According to TeachNC on November 3rd of this school year, there were over 8500 vacancies in North Carolina for classroom teachers ALONE.

In all, there were over 23,600 vacancies.

Just looking at those teacher vacancies – the average salary of a teacher in NC is right under $55,000 a year (according to the report from the John Locke Foundation).

Teachers are paid ten months our of the year. That would mean an average of $5,468 a month per teacher. But if 8504 teaching positions were still vacant, that means a little over $46 million dollars is not being paid in salaries on a monthly basis.

Add to that, there are retirement funds were not being met by the state for those salaries.

Yet, the same amount of work was having to be done by fewer people whose salaries had not been altered.

Thay was in the third month of the school year. Where was that $46 million dollars a month going?

Now we are in the 10th month of the school year. Those numbers for vacancies have only gotten higher. In facr, for most of 2021, the number of vacancies for teachers alone was twice that of the November 3rd number.

Today, it looks like this for classroom teachers:

And overall:

So where are those millions and millions of dollars in those already budgeted salaries for positions that were never filled going?

Because it is no longer just at the amount we had in November.

And it’s been going on for ten months now.