No seat for NC board of education on new high school redesign commission

The North Carolina State Board of Education will have no appointments to a new 15-member commission charged with redesigning the state’s high schools. Board members used part of the Aug. 5 meeting to ask why. They didn’t get many answers.

The North Carolina High School Redesign Commission would be authorized in House Bill 268, a measure that would amend the state budget Gov. Josh Stein signed into law in July. The Senate passed the bill in late July and the House on the morning of Aug. 5, as the board was meeting. It was ratified the following day.

Although the new commission would be housed within the Department of Public Instruction (DPI), it would operate independently of the agency. Its assignments are broad, with direction to study more flexible diploma requirements, ways for students to earn credit outside a traditional classroom, the use of artificial intelligence in career exploration and work-based learning, and “alternative funding models” for what the bill calls a statewide learning ecosystem.

At the state school board’s recent meeting, board members asked what authority the commission would actually exercise, why the board received no seat, how it would be funded, and how its work would relate to that of the Blue Ribbon Commission on teacher pay, which is due to vote on its own recommendations in September.

“Why DPI would not be involved in that process in some form beyond simply having the state superintendent as one of many members, and why the state board would in no way be involved at all: I think those are legitimate questions one could ask,” said vice chair Alan Duncan.

Geoff Coltrane, DPI’s director of government affairs and strategy, told the board he could not answer most of the queries.

Under HB 268, the House speaker recommends two members to the new redesign commission and the Senate president pro tempore recommends two. The governor appoints one. The chair must be elected from among the four members the General Assembly appoints, and the chair in turn appoints the final two — the chief administrative officer or president of a community college and the superintendent of a school district, both limited to institutions already participating in the state’s competency-based education programs.

The state superintendent, or a designee, holds a seat. The state board does not.

Four more seats go to the chief executives, or their designees, of myFutureNC, the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce, BEST NC, and SparkNC. The presidents of the UNC System, the state community college system, and North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities — or their designees — round out the membership.

Those four private organizations are also assigned the commission’s staff work. The bill directs the chair to designate one or more of them “to plan and manage Commission meetings and draft reports.” Designated organizations “shall provide administrative staff for meetings.” Money appropriated to DPI to contract with them is to be “divided equally among the organizations designated by the chair” unless the chair and all of the designated organizations agree otherwise.

As for funding, the bill sets no dollar figure. Line-item detail for the 2026 budget sits in a Joint Conference Committee Report dated June 30 that the budget act incorporates by reference rather than printing.

The same bill does appropriate money elsewhere in its education section. Fourteen sections after the commission, HB 268 creates a competitive speech and debate team grant program and increases DPI’s appropriation by $250,000 to run it. Section 3.12, which creates the commission, contains no comparable provision.

The commission would report to the Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee by April 30, 2027, and would terminate June 30, 2031, or upon filing of its final annual report, whichever comes first.

Stein has not signed or vetoed HB 268 as of Aug. 10.

“No seat for NC board of education on new high school redesign commission” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.