Advocacy
Every day in Wake County, a new kindergarten class is born. With nearly 160,000 public school students in Wake County alone, the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) is larger than the entire public school systems of eight U.S. states.
In our rapidly growing county – home to the state capital, Research Triangle Park, and diverse communities – state-level advocacy is not enough. WakeEd Partnership exists to ensure an advocate for all WCPSS teachers sees the full scope of education in our county and works to help state and local elected officials make decisions that lead to positive educational outcomes.
Public Policy Agenda
Strong Schools in Every Community
- Provide adequate state and local public education funding which ensures every school has the proper staff, supplies, and support to produce high-achieving students from pre-kindergarten through high school graduation.
- Formulate equitable school performance reports which are simple but comprehensive, tools for demonstrating effectiveness and areas for growth.
- Address performance inequities among schools by giving local education authorities the flexibility to innovate at the district and school building levels.
Excellent Educators in Every School
- Strengthen the career pipeline by reducing impediments to licensure, developing educational leaders, and providing competitive compensation throughout the professional continuum.
- Invest in professional development programs which build capacity of educators to adapt to emerging best practices and dynamic teaching methods.
- Create advanced teaching roles which inspire teachers to lead within their school communities by adopting structures of advanced responsibility.
Successful Students in Every Classroom
- Ensure equal access for students to an education which includes arts, sciences, engineering, technology, mathematics, and literature, which prepares students for college, career, and civic participation.
- Promote literacy initiatives which ensure all students will read proficiently by the end of third grade and beyond.
- Diversify student evaluation to include multiple measurement methods which capture the full growth of students each school year.
2019-20 Legislative Policies
Strong Schools in Every Community
- Adequate funding for school operations
- Restore flexibility to allotment categories
- Provide funding to meet K-3 class size requirements
- Modify the state school calendar law
- Align high schools to the post-secondary calendar
- Eliminate statutory school year end date
- Adjust school grading formula
- Remove F grade
- Properly weight achievement and growth
Excellent Educators in Every School
- Funding for professional development
- Invest in programs which improve educators’ abilities to innovate instruction
- Teacher pay raise
- Reach national average
- Restore Master’s pay and annual step increases on all salary schedules
- Expand, fund, and make permanent the Advanced Teaching Roles legislation
- Principals pay raise and salary schedule enhancements
- Provide incentives for the best principals to work at low performing schools
- Appropriate pay for support staff
- Instructional assistants, bus drivers, child nutrition staff, and clerical staff
Successful Students in Every Classroom
- Promote universal literacy
- Embed early literacy practices to improve grade-level reading proficiency
- Fund local programs which show promise
- Significantly and permanently increase funding for student support services
- School-based social workers, counselors, psychologists, and nurses
- Restore funding for learning materials such as textbooks and digital resources
- Ensure local school district choice in which materials to purchase
- Revise testing requirements
- Utilize flexibility of ESSA to modify NC’s state testing requirements
In-Context Archive
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Learn more about the Wake Education Partnership.