In March of 2019, then State Supt. Mark Johnson released his budget recommendations for the next two-year cycle for the North Carolina General Assembly to use in their shaky investment in NC’s public schools.

He published those recommendations on his website (it is not in existence any longer). Here is part of that list.

There was a $750K request for TeachNC  described by Kelly Hinchcliffe on WRAL.com as:

His second initiative is a collaboration among the Department of Public Instruction, BEST NC and Teach.org, with support from the Belk Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Coastal Credit Union. “Teach NC,” launching this spring, is a “public-private teacher appreciation campaign to better align the image of the teaching profession with the fruitful, fulfilling career it is and develop a statewide teacher-recruitment system to attract the next generation of North Carolina teachers.”

And in May of 2019 many people received this email.

It led one to a beta-version of the site that will serve as a dashboard for potential openings and  public relations front using the glossy exterior of Mark Johnson’s rhetoric.

It was rather interesting that with all of the glorious reforms that Phil Berger and his cronies have put in place in North Carolina to “help” public education, NC needs to “attract” people to the profession with this site.

Truth be known, if NC re-instituted graduate degree pay, longevity pay, and salary step increases for every year; gave back due-process rights and career status; stopped the cycle of never ending testing and evaluations; stopped measuring schools with a bad performance grading system; actually listened to teachers in making policy decisions; stopped giving money to non-transparent voucher systems and unregulated charter schools;  funded state mandates; treated veteran teachers better; and brought back the Teaching Fellows Program to its original state (among other things), then…

TeachNC would never be needed.

But this is what it looks like right now.

Since the TeachNC initiative has started, the number of educators and support staff has gone up.

A lot.