Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools just cancelled classes for nearly 150,000 students on May 1st because 2,622 teachers requested the day off to bus up to Raleigh and protest at the state capitol. Not a snow day. Not a safety emergency. Not a burst pipe. The district shut down because the teachers wanted to go yell about money.
Happy International Workers’ Day, comrades! Nothing says “we’re doing this for the children” like abandoning 150,000 of them so you can wave signs on a weekday. Karl Marx would be proud. The kids’ parents? Not so much.
Let’s get into the math here, because the math is fantastic.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg has roughly 18,000 teachers and staff. Out of those 18,000, about 2,600 requested leave. That’s roughly 15 percent of the workforce. And because 15 percent of the teachers wanted to skip work, ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of the students got sent home. Every single one. All 150,000 kids — out the door.
Imagine telling your boss that 15 percent of your department is taking a personal day, so the entire company needs to shut down. You’d be laughed out of the building. But when teachers do it, the school board calls a press conference and talks about how they “don’t make this decision lightly.”
Board Chair Stephanie Sneed delivered that gem with a straight face, by the way. She said the district needs “support from our state” and that cancelling school was the responsible move. Responsible! Cancelling school for 150,000 children is the responsible thing to do when your employees want to go protest.
Pop quiz, Stephanie: responsible to whom, exactly? Because it sure isn’t the single mom in Charlotte who now has to find childcare on zero notice. It isn’t the dad who has to burn a vacation day because his kid’s teacher decided the state capitol was more important than third-period algebra.
The protest is organized by the North Carolina Association of Educators, which is the teachers’ union that swears it isn’t a teachers’ union. They’re marching to Raleigh to demand — you’ll never guess — more money. More funding. More resources. The same thing they demand every single year while test scores keep sliding and parents keep pulling their kids out for charter schools and homeschooling.
And they picked May 1st. May Day. International Workers’ Day. The holiday celebrated by socialist movements around the world since 1889. The day the Soviet Union used to roll tanks through Red Square. Purely coincidental timing, we’re sure.
(For the record, the NC Association of Educators’ website has a whole section about “social justice” and “equity.” Shocking.)
Here’s the part that should really cook your grits. These are the same people who spent two years during COVID telling us that keeping kids home from school was a catastrophe. “Kids are falling behind!” “The learning loss is devastating!” “We need to get kids back in the classroom NOW!” Remember all that?
Funny how the learning loss crisis disappears when the teachers want a day off to go protest. Suddenly, one missed day is no big deal. Suddenly, the kids will be fine. Suddenly, it’s the “responsible” decision.
Rules for thee, never for them.
And what are they protesting for? What could possibly be so urgent that it justifies pulling 150,000 kids out of school? North Carolina ranks in the middle of the pack nationally for teacher pay. Charlotte-Mecklenburg starting salaries are above $40,000 with full benefits, a pension, and — here’s the kicker — 187 work days per year. That’s right. Teachers work 187 days. The average American worker clocks in for about 260. Teachers get summers off, winter break, spring break, fall break, and apparently now they also get May Day off to go protest for even more money.
Nobody is saying teachers don’t work hard. But when you cancel school for 150,000 kids because you want to march on the capitol and demand a bigger slice of the taxpayer pie, you lose the moral high ground. Fast.
The parents in Charlotte are furious, and they should be. Working families don’t have the luxury of just not showing up on a Thursday. They can’t call their employer and say, “Hey, I know we had plans, but I feel really strongly about state budget priorities, so I’m going to need the day off. Also, shut down the whole office while I’m gone.”
That’s not how the real world works. But it’s how public education works, because the teachers’ unions have more power than the parents, the students, and the taxpayers combined.
This is what happens when we treat public schools like government jobs programs instead of institutions that exist to educate children. The kids come last. They always come last. The union comes first, the administrators come second, the bureaucrats come third, and somewhere way down at the bottom of the priority list — oh right, the 150,000 kids who were supposed to learn something on Thursday.
To every parent in Charlotte scrambling to figure out what to do with your kids on May 1st: we see you. And we’d suggest remembering this moment the next time the school board asks you to approve a bond referendum.
They cancelled your kid’s education so they could take a field trip. On the communist holiday. Classic