Week 2 In Depth continues… trends

After three long days of interpretation, I’ve finally made some since of the numbers I collected.

I’ve learned that there are three overall trends locally and in North Carolina when it comes to cutting back in the education budget: reducing teacher assistants, freezing teacher pay and reducing money for textbooks/supplies.

In the 2013 school year budget, the biggest cuts occurred in the form of reducing money for teacher assistants and eliminating tenure for future teachers. I believe these two topics will be some of the main subjects my sources will wish to address in their interviews. While cutting money towards TA’s has been a common practice over the past five years, the elimination of teacher tenure is new. In fact, some are even questioning the legality of this new cut.

Regardless, the trends I’ve found while searching through the education budgets for the last five years are clearly important and relevant to schools in the High Country and in the state.

I begun to set up interviews with different people in county offices across the High Country. They will be able to give me more personal information about how the education budgets have affected schools over the past five years.