EdNC. Essential education news. Important stories. Your voice.

Search ednc.org

Senate leader decries DPI reorganization

Share this story

Our republishing policy

EdNC is a nonprofit, online, daily, independent newspaper. All of EdNC’s content is open source and free to republish. Please use the following guidelines when republishing our content.
  • Our content must be republished in full. If your organization uses a paywall, the content must be provided in full for free.
  • Credit our team by including both the author name and EdNC.org in the byline. Example: Alex Granados, EdNC.org.
  • If republishing the story online, please provide a link to EdNC.org or a link to the original article in either the byline or credit line.
  • The original headline of the article must be used. Allowable edits to the content of the piece include changes to meet your publication’s style guide and references to dates (i.e. this week changed to last week). Other edits must be approved by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
  • Photos and other multimedia elements (audio, video, etc.) may not be republished without prior permission. Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you are interested in sharing a multimedia element.
  • If you republish a story, please let us know by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you have any questions. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Canonical tag

Please include the following canonical tag in the <head> of the republished story.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.ednc.org/21410/">

HTML content

This includes the title, byline, content, and tracking pixel required for republishing this story.

Copy & paste HTML
This story is tagged:
President Pro Tempore Phil Berger

The News & Observer and WRAL are reporting that Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, is upset about state education leaders’ reorganization plans.

EdNC broke the news last month that State Superintendent June Atkinson and State Board of Education Chair Bill Cobey were using money earmarked for the Excellent Public Schools Act to preserve jobs they had to trim under a General Assembly-mandated 5 percent cut to the state Department of Public Instruction budget.

At the time, Atkinson said the employees whose jobs were saved would be handling aspects of the Act which relate to their positions, and that some of them had already been taking on those responsibilities.

Read to Achieve is part of the Excellent Public Schools Act. In a letter sent to Atkinson and Cobey Monday, Berger said the additional money coming from the legislature to DPI for the Act was meant to be used on tutors, according to the News & Observer. The article reported that he said DPI was using the money instead for its “bloated bureaucracy,” and WRAL reported that he said DPI’s use of the funds was a “violation of the budget’s requirement for a reduction in the department’s operating costs,”

Atkinson said that Berger had made a mistake and that the State Board had already approved money for tutors, the News & Observer reported. The newspaper also stated that Berger said the State Board may have violated the state’s Open Meetings Law by discussing the budget issue in closed session. Atkinson disagreed with the assertion, according to the article.

WRAL reported that Berger wants a response from Atkinson on this issue by week’s end.

The State Board is set to discuss spending on summer reading camps — part of Read to Achieve — at this week’s meeting.

Read our original coverage of DPI’s reorganization here.