School money will be used to plug budget

Schools across state will be lacking construction money

By: Lisa Boone-wood | JOURNAL REPORTER
Published: March 02, 2009

Money originally designated for school construction will now be used to cover some of the state's budget shortfall, officials said Friday.

State officials told educators throughout North Carolina that they will use about $43 million from two of the state's school-construction accounts -- lottery money and the public-school-building-capital fund -- to balance this year's budget. It's their plan for making it through the rest of the fiscal year without asking school districts to send back more money.

The lottery money for second-quarter construction was about $37 million statewide, and there was about $5 million in the public-school-building-capital fund, which is a corporate tax that companies pay for school construction.

But using school-construction money means that local systems will not be able to tap those funds to help repay construction debt for new schools.

"Here in Forsyth, we're looking at probably about $1.4 million," said Superintendent Don Martin of Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools. "Clearly counties are unhappy … everybody is unhappy with it, but counties in particular because they have to pay a debt service and now they won't have that money."

Martin said that school officials also would have been unhappy if they would have had to find money to send back to the state this month.

"You can't turn off the lights and say we're not going to go to school today … that's why there was this direction," Martin said. "There's a little $43 million bump the state identified to help get through the rest of this year."

Using money originally set aside for school construction to cover the state's budget shortfall is one of several things that state officials are doing to plan for a balanced budget, said Vanessa Jeter, a spokeswoman for the N.C. Department of Public Instruction.

School districts and state officials have been having weekly conference calls to talk about finances for the past few weeks.

"We're holding these calls with our local superintendents to give them as much information as we can about the economic situation in North Carolina and the federal stimulus package because the details are continuing to flow out from Washington," she said.

"We'll do this as long as it's necessary to give them the information they need."

■ Lisa Boone-Wood can be reached at 727-7232 or at lboone-wood@wsjournal.com.