A version of this story first appeared in WFAE Education Reporter James Farrell's weekly newsletter. Sign up here to get newsletters from WFAE straight to your inbox.
Winter break was a slow time on the school's beat, with schools being out (though we did see North Carolina sign onto a lawsuit trying to undo a federal funding cut — read more on that here).
But the holiday feasts and parties are behind us. Students returned to class in Charlotte this week, the state Board of Education meets and teachers across the state are planning potential walkouts for Wednesday and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Board will hold its annual joint meeting with the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners on Thursday.
All that to say: we’re back, baby!
To kick off 2026, here’s a look at some of the local education stories I’m thinking about.
A new CMS Board
This past November brought significant change on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Board of Education, with four new members.
Charlitta Hatch, Anna London, Cynthia Stone and Shamaiye Haynes will join as freshmen board members. They'll serve alongside the freshly re-elected Stephanie Sneed and Dee Rankin, and the three at-large members: Monty Witherspoon, Lenora Shipp and Liz Monterrey-Duvall. There’s also a new student advisor: Inchara Gopinath, a junior at North Mecklenburg High School.
It marks the first time in recent memory that the board has been entirely made up of Democratic- endorsed candidates. The shift also means that former board members Summer Nunn, Lisa Cline and Melissa Easley — the trio who voted against last year’s budget and had developed a reputation for questioning certain administrative decisions, like the approval of a controversial contract — are no longer on the board.
As for the new board’s working relationship, so far, so good in the early going. Shamaiye Haynes has described the six members who won their elections this year as “the fab five plus one” (with the one being Rankin, who ran unopposed). Here’s a video they made together ahead of last month’s swearing in.
But now it will be interesting to see which, if any, unique factions emerge.
Another tight budget cycle?
Last year’s budget cycle was marked by uncertainty and cuts at the federal level, continued impacts from the expiration of federal pandemic relief funds and disagreements over whether the district should seek more funding for higher teacher pay from Mecklenburg County.
One thing we know about this year’s budget cycle: It’ll be tight again.
Much of the uncertainty we saw last year will continue – the Trump Administration has been eyeing more cuts to the Education Department, frozen federal education funding and cut grant programs (see the aforementioned lawsuit). Factor in that we still don’t have a state budget (which is another story we’ll be watching closely in and of itself), and there are a lot of questions.
The district has already announced it would hire 200 fewer employees this year, given the latest state data showing enrollment at CMS has dropped by 1.7%
The CMS Board meets with the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners this week to discuss budget priorities. I'll be there.
Comprehensive Review
Every four years, the CMS Board is supposed to engage in a comprehensive review, where it assesses its student assignment data to see where changes are necessary.
Last school year, the board started the process – you might remember the flurry of student assignment changes in September 2024. Those were billed as “Phase I” of the broader comprehensive review.
But after reviewing a whole smorgasbord of data back in November of 2024, the planned second phase seemed to fizzle out. In December, the board said it needed more time to review the data — and then never really talked about it again.
Former board member Nunn alluded to this in her final comments on the board back in November:
“We must acknowledge that operational strain we carry because the comprehensive review has not been complete. It's going to be hard, necessary work for balancing boundaries, feeder patterns, magnet alignment, but it was not completed by boards of the past and it's the work that this next board is going to have to take up. And that's costing us outdated boundaries, misaligned magnets, unbalanced enrollment.”
There are some indications the board will aim to pick the review back up this year.
CMS told me in May 2025 that the district was evaluating "data related to the ten-year forecast and the review of our Choice programs.”
“After a thorough evaluation, we will present our findings to the board during the 2025-2026 school year," the district said at the time.
The last full comprehensive review was in 2017. The board initially launched an effort in 2023 that stalled out, before trying again last school year. There had been a lot of focus at that time on getting the 2023 bond approved and finding a new superintendent.
It doesn’t mean nothing has changed, however – as I mentioned, there were some changes approved last school year as part of phase one of this effort. A comprehensive review, potentially shifting thousands of students, is no easy task and often comes with a lot of controversy. As my predecessor Ann Doss Helms wrote, it’s “consistently one of the most controversial things any school board can do.”
Hey, speaking of things that take a really long time…
LEANDRO WATCH - It’s been 684 days without a ruling
February will mark two full years since the state Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the long-running Leandro school funding case.
Two. Full. Years.
It’s the latest hold-up in a 31-year saga that will determine whether the state will fund a comprehensive remedial plan for the state’s schools that aims to tackle funding inequities. The General Assembly has historically been reluctant to fund the settlement, despite courts claiming schools were denying students the right to a “sound, basic education” that’s promised in the state constitution.
The state Supreme Court was asked to weigh in on this again back in 2024 – though that decision was in itself controversial – and has been silent on it since.
