WS Chronicle

TEVIN STINSON 

THE CHRONICLE  

 The Forsyth County Board of Commissioners has approved the county’s $591 million budget for fiscal year 2025-2026, but the real news is what they didn’t approve during their meeting on Thursday, June 5. The board voted not to approve the school district’s request for an additional $32 million to fill gaps in their budget.  

What We Know 

It’s important to note that this year’s budget was completed in a property tax reevaluation year. In North Carolina, counties are required to conduct real estate reappraisal at least once every eight years. Since the mid-1980s, Forsyth County has done reappraisals every four years.  

The budget sets the property tax rate at 53.52 cents per $100 of assessed property value, a decrease of 14.26 cents due to the historic increases in property values found during reappraisal. The revenue-neutral rate to bring in the same amount of revenue as the current tax rate would have been 49.04 cents (a decrease of 18.74 cents). For the average median home value in Forsyth County of $269,700, the new tax rate will be a $120.83 increase above the revenue-neutral tax rate, or the equivalent of $10.07 per month.  

Additionally, the county budget covers a wide range of essential services. It includes funding for local public schools and Forsyth Technical Community College (FTCC), Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department and Emergency Medical Services, and other county departments, community grants, and capital improvements. A portion of the budget is also set aside to pay off existing debt, including bonds and other projects.  

As it has been for at least the last decade, education remains the county’s top spending area, accounting for 33% of the total budget. Most of the funds allocated for education will go to Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools (WS/FCS), which will receive $180 million of the $195 million for education. The rest will go to FTCC.  

Still, It’s Not Enough  

When compared to funding they received from the county last year, WS/FCS will receive about $6.7 more in fiscal year 2025-2026, despite the county’s overall budget increasing by less than 1%. But in the words of Grammy winning recording artist Kendrick Lamar in his hit single, ‘TV Off, “… it’s not enough.”  

In March, findings from an audit showed WS/FCS overspent $16 million during the 2023-2024 school year, which led to an $8 million budget shortfall for the 2024-2025 school year. To address the deficit, former Superintendent Tricia McManus proposed several cost-cutting measures for the remainder of the 2024-2025 school year and the 2025-2026 school year.  

To get a better understanding of the deficit, earlier this month the board of education voted to approve a contract for HIL Consultants to assist the financial department with closing out the 2023-2024 school year.   

HIL’s preliminary analysis revealed the district is overspending state funds that cover personal costs, and the budget shortfall is much worse than they thought. The shortfall is now estimated to be around $42 million for the 2024-2025 fiscal year alone.   

In addition to the saving plan already in motion, McManus proposed new measures to help the district get out of the $42 million hole. The new list of recommendations would save the district around $10 million. For the rest, McManus proposed asking the county for a one-time payment of $32 million.  

“If the county were to say we will give you a one-time payment of this amount, we would also have to build in paying that back over time and that would need to be an agreement with our board and theirs,” said McManus while giving her overview of her saving plan last week. 

County Commissioners decided not to give WS/FCS the loan. In order to approve the district’s request, the county would have to pull from its fund balance which would risk the county’s triple-A bond rating. 

Chair of the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners Don Martin said when discussing the deficit with financial officers with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI), they said overspending happens in districts across the state quite often, with small amounts of money. When it does happen, NCDPI will charge districts 1% interest per month. “When you do that and it were to continue for 12 months … basically on $18 million you’re paying $180,000 a month, plus it gets compounded every month thereafter,” Martin explained. 

During the meeting with state officials, including State Superintendent Mo Green, and local district leaders, Martin said they discussed a number of issues around the budget shortfall. Commissioner Martin, who served as superintendent of WS/FCS from 1995 to 2014, also suggested that the deficit could be even more once the district reviews end-of-year finances at the end of June.  

Commissioner Malishai Woodbury presented an alternative motion to include a tax increase in the budget to help the local schools. “My alternative motion would be to add a 2-cent tax increase to help with the 2026 school district budget,” Woodbury said.  

Woodbury’s motion was tabled for a vote after not receiving a second. Before the budget was tabled for a vote, Woodbury, who is a Democrat, and Commissioner Gloria Whisenhunt, who is a Republican made it clear that she would not be voting in support of the budget.  

“I will not be able to support a budget that does not take into consideration support of what will obviously be a very challenging year … for public schools,” Woodbury said. “Our public schools here in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County, we already know are underfunded and this has just compounded an issue we already have.”  

Commissioner Whisenhunt said she couldn’t support the budget because it goes against an ordinance approved by the board last year that essentially did away with community grants when funds were needed elsewhere.  

“It’s going against our ordinance that we all voted on last year on community grants, which says it’s not guaranteed every year and they should not expect it to be every year, and this is certainly not a year for the grants,” Whisenhunt said.