Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools officials acknowledged Wednesday that the district has missed out on two years of grants for homeless students because of what CMS calls “a paperwork error under previous leadership.”
District officials now say they learned about the lost grants more than a year ago. WCNC broke the story.
CMS has almost 5,500 students considered homeless or lacking stable housing. The federal McKinney-Vento Act requires school districts to provide those students a range of services.
CMS acknowledged it received no McKinney-Vento grants for two school years, from 2023 to 2025. The district has not answered questions about how much money was involved, but sent a statement saying it represented “0.0038% of the total budget.” CMS also has not answered questions about who made the error — or even which previous leadership the statement refers to.
Superintendent Earnest Winston was fired in April of 2022. The McKinney-Vento grants were not cited in documents released about the cause of his firing. Hugh Hattabaugh stepped in as interim superintendent, then announced in November of 2022 that he was leaving about halfway through his 14-month contract. Crystal Hill took over as interim in January of 2023 and was hired as superintendent last summer.
The CMS statement says it has reallocated money to ensure the students get all the services they’re entitled to and added 33 social workers.
Here’s the full statement from CMS:
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is committed to providing our students with the resources they need to thrive and grow. Due to a paperwork error under previous leadership, CMS did not receive grant funding for McKinney-Vento services in the 2023-24 or 2024-25 school years. We were informed that we did not qualify for the grant over a year ago. We have reallocated district funds and are working with (North Carolina Department of Public Instruction) to ensure that all benefits and programs offered through McKinney-Vento are fully funded and provided to the 5,447 identified CMS students. We have also increased and reallocated the number of support social workers to 143, 33 more than last year. Although this grant represented 0.0038% of our total budget, we have proactively redirected other grant funds to support qualifying students.
