Child care advocates hope to stave off state budget cuts they fear effectively end pre-kindergarten services in North Carolina.

Deep inroads would be made in funding for early childhood programs like Smart Start and More at Four.

“We have continued to have cuts every year for years,” said Lisa Woolard, executive director of the Beaufort-Hyde Partnership for Children.

The 20-percent cuts in pre-kindergarten called for in the budget would be higher than cuts targeting public schools, universities or community colleges, Woolard said.

“It seems a little disproportionate,” she said.

Every child in Beaufort County is eligible for the partnership’s services, Woolard pointed out.

The partnership notes approximately 1,500 children are in some form of child care in its two-county service area.

“Certainly those children would have the most direct impact,” Woolard said, pointing to the budget numbers on the table.

“Our job is to get kids ready for kindergarten,” she said, adding these children will enter kindergarten, ready or not.

A public problem

Public school officials also are bracing for cuts.

In their various budget discussions, the Republican leaders in the House proposed a roughly 8 percent reduction in spending for the state’s public schools.

At various times, these proposals have included funds only for teacher assistants in kindergarten and first grade for a savings of $259 million, a $59 million cut in school support staff, a $30 million cut in funds for at-risk children and a $25 million cut in funds for school principals and assistant principals.

House Republican leaders also wanted high school students to pay as much as $75 for driver education classes they now take for free, funded entirely by state taxpayers. Schools could either make up the difference with local money or charge students a fee of up to $75 for driver education classes.

Robert Belcher, chairman of the Beaufort County Board of Education, has said that cuts such as these, if approved, will lead to tough decisions by the local board.

“Are teacher assistants valuable enough in the upper grades that we’re willing to spend a lot of local money for them?” he asked at a recent school board meeting. “That’s our conundrum right there, and that’s just one of the discussions we’re going to have to have.”

Even after the budget is approved by the House, it moves to the state Senate where Don Phipps, superintendent of Beaufort County Schools, and other school leaders have said they fear even deeper cuts in public school funding.

‘We cleaned up their mess’

One local House member said the education cuts are unfortunate, but could have been worse.

The spending plan doesn’t take teachers out of the classroom, said Rep. Bill Cook, R-Beaufort.

“About the best comment I can give you is we’re still working on it and hopefully we’ll be voting on it next week,” Cook said. “I think it’s going pretty good. We’re doing some pretty good stuff.”

Cook recalled Democrats controlled the Legislature prior to last year’s Republican takeover.

“I wish we didn’t have to cut as much as we had,” he said. “If the folks who had been in power before us had done their job there wouldn’t have been as many cuts this time. It’s unfortunate, but we got it straightened out. We cleaned up their mess.”

GOP leaders have said serious measures are necessary to cover a more than $2 billion budget shortfall.

Democrats have argued some of the education cuts could be avoided by extending a temporary sales tax increase, but Republicans seem almost uniformly opposed to that prospect.

Basically, Republicans blame the shortfall on spending endorsed by the old Democratic majority, while the Democrats say slowing tax collections and other effects of the Great Recession were the real culprits.

More at Four, or less in 2011?

The proposed state budget would:

ź take 20 percent, or $170,000, from Smart Start in Beaufort County;

ź slash 20 percent, or $180,000 from More at Four here;

ź and make more drastic inroads into early childhood funding than in education at higher levels.

Source: Lisa Woolard, Beaufort-Hyde Partnership for Children