The Hunt Institute does not lobby. They do not have a legislative agenda.
Established in 2001, what they do, according to the website and leaders of the organization, is bring together leaders to “inform elected officials and policymakers about key issues in education.”
Ahead of each session of the N.C. General Assembly, legislators are invited to the Holshouser Legislative Retreat, and the goal is to inspire leadership and legislation and other “strategic action for greater educational outcomes and student success.”
The gathering facilitates year-to-year a bipartisan conversation that uncovers common ground. But it is also a reminder that party is not the only line of difference. The retreat creates space for different understandings to be shared between new and veteran legislators, urban and rural legislators, and legislators serving in the House and the Senate. As the retreat unfolds and legislators discuss complicated, complex policy issues, what emerges, according to the invitation, are the “policy opportunities and needs across the education continuum.”
This year, the 22th Annual Holshouser Legislators Retreat was chaired by Sens. Michael Lee, R-New Hanover, and Sydney Batch, D-Wake; and Reps. Zack Hawkins, D-Durham, and David Willis, R-Union.
“Gov. Holshouser and Gov. Hunt believed that if North Carolina was to succeed and lead in education we needed bipartisan commitments to work together to do what”s best for children,” said Allison Goff Clark, the director of state engagement at The Hunt Institute. “This is an opportunity for legislators to build relationships, learn together with one another, and to think intentionally about how they can come together to serve students and their families across North Carolina.”
Newly elected state Superintendent Mo Green welcomed the legislators to the retreat. He said we have an opportunity to have the best public schools in the country.
“The bar must be set as high as possible,” Green said. “Our state’s future is directly tied to the education we provide to our students. By working together — educators, policymakers, and community members — we can ensure every child has access to a high-quality education that prepares them for success.”
Access to high-quality early learning is at a ‘critical juncture.’ Here’s why
Legislators said access to high-quality early learning is at a “critical juncture.”
Discussing a range of issues impacting early education from availability to staffing to cost, they used words like “it’s real,” “crisis,” and “dire.”
Access to quality care is a critical issue facing families and communities across North Carolina. There are currently 708,818 children ages five and under, with about 63 percent of these children having all available parents in the workforce. This translates into 446,555 children in need of child care. The state has 362,228 licensed child care facility spots available, leaving more than 84,000 children, or 19 percent, without access to licensed childcare. This child care gap has a substantial impact.
The Hunt Institute Issue Brief
A critical juncture for little learners, families, and providers — and for the state’s economy.
Providers, state leaders, and philanthropists talked with legislators at the retreat about the economic impact of high-quality early learning opportunities and the implications for lifelong success.
Sandy Weathersbee, a provider, said change starts with changing how the public and policymakers think about the profession. It diminishes the importance of the work, he said, when educators are referred to as daycare or nursery workers.
“Call us neuron developers,” he said.
According to the issue brief for the retreat, “Vision, hearing, language, and higher cognitive development occur sequentially, with 90 percent of brain development happening from birth to five.” Investments also improve markers of success throughout life, including third grade reading proficiency, high school graduation, postsecondary outcomes, and leadership.
Experts noted the need to think about investment in early education as an investment in state infrastructure with short- and long-term implications for the state’s economy.
Russ Altenburg, the senior education program officer at the Leon Levine Foundation, said the foundation is prioritizing investments in early education based on the research, which shows: 1) a child’s first five years lay the foundation for lifelong success, 2) investing in early childhood is North Carolina’s smartest workforce strategy, 3) it saves taxpayer dollars, and 4) the earlier you invest, the higher the return on investment longer term.
“At the same time,” Altenburg said, “when it comes to the challenge of having more high-quality early learning seats for low-income families, that is a problem that philanthropy cannot solve alone.”
Dr. Iheoma Iruka, a professor at UNC, said to the legislators, “North Carolina is a pioneer, and I know that you all can do it.”
Reimagining education funding
In 2023, Sen. Michael Lee and others filed a bill to prompt a conversation about North Carolina’s funding K-12 model. Advocacy groups from the John Locke Foundation to the Public School Forum of North Carolina have picked up that conversation and broadened it to include local leaders statewide.
Jennifer Schiess, a partner with Bellwether, lives in North Carolina, but nationally she is seen as a thought leader on state education funding, working on this issue most recently in Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama.
Schiess said every state has a formula for funding education, and there are three types of formulas:
- Resourced-based formula. North Carolina is one of seven states that continues to rely on a resourced-based formula. Resources include allotments for teachers, for example.
- Program-based formula. Only Wisconsin uses this formula, which Schiess likened to a block grant.
- Weighted-student funding formula.
For states with weighted-student funding formula, there are three parts, said Schiess:
- A base amount, for example $10,000 per student.
- A collection of weights tied to student needs that are associated with higher costs of learning. These are a percent of the base amount and get added to the base amount. The most common three additional weights include low-income students, students with disabilities, and English-language learners.
- Community-level weights, for example for concentrated poverty or rural communities. These are also a percent of the base amount and get added to the base amount.
This kind of formula allows legislatures to focus on the state investment in the base amount, and then the formula drives the total state appropriation.
Meghan McLeroy, the president of Arena Policy in Tennessee, talked about the experience of her state in shifting to a weighted-student funding formula.
Tennessee had a resource-based formula for more than 30 years, she said, and study after study for more than 15 years supported a change in the formula. McLeroy said the formula in Tennessee changed when collectively stakeholders reached a “breaking point,” tired of resigning themselves to change at the margins of possibility.
In Tennessee, the legislature committed $1 billion to shift the formula, she said, making it politically viable for there to be no losers in the policy change.
Lee raised insightful questions about how to get statewide buy-in, how states approach trust and transparency and accountability, the timeline for legislation, the impact on local funding, and implications for charters.
“It’s a huge mindset shift at the state and local level,” said Schiess. The flexibility in spending at the local level requires what she called “big accountability.”
Lessons learned include earmarking increases in the base amount for existing teacher raises, requiring data on school report cards to look at outcomes side by side with dollars, and particular considerations from how to fund technology and pilots to prompt innovation.
In Tennessee, the state department of education led the way in pushing for the policy change and garnering support statewide.
“This is an incredibly important issue for education in North Carolina,” Lee said to his fellow legislators. “We have to move forward to get something done and that will require us to work in a bipartisan way with Superintendent Green and the governor.”
The North Carolina story on higher education affordability
In North Carolina, since 2019, there has been bipartisan, cross-sector agreement that “increasing educational attainment will enhance North Carolinians’ economic prosperity and current and future workforce needs.” That agreement and commitment shows up in the work of myFutureNC and the state’s progress towards our attainment goal — to have 2 million North Carolinians aged 25-44 hold an industry-valued credential or postsecondary degree by 2030.
The state’s investment in higher education affordability — a counter example to the national trend — undergirds the commitment to the attainment goal.
As John Denning, a senior advisor to the John M. Belk Endowment, said at the retreat, it’s about success for our students, dreaming about and investing in what’s on the other side of a diploma or degree, and giving more and more of them the ability to participate in our global interdependent economy.
Peter Hans, the president of the University of North Carolina System and former president of the N.C. Community College System, noted, “enrollment is up, retentions are up, graduation rates are up, public support is up, private support is up, research funding is up, tuition has been flat for nine years in a row, and student debt levels are down.”
“That is a tremendous success story,” Hans said.
Several initiatives ensure that higher education is affordable and accessible for students, including:
The NextNC scholarship is a funding source that prospective students can utilize to mitigate the costs associated with postsecondary education. NextNC combines the federal Pell Grant with state-based financial aid with eligibility determined automatically when students completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). Eligible students attending a community college will receive at least $3,000, while those attending a public university in North Carolina will get a minimum of $5,000.
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Through NC Promise, the state has significantly reduced student tuition to $500 per semester at four UNC System institutions: Elizabeth City State University, Fayetteville State University, The University of North Carolina at Pembroke, and Western Carolina University. The plan has increased educational access, reduced student debt, and grown the state’s economy.
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The Fixed Tuition Program ensures that once North Carolina residents enter as first-year students at any UNC System Institution, tuition rates will not go up for eight consecutive semesters of enrollment. Students who remain continuously enrolled at a UNC System institution through fall and spring semesters will not see an increase in their tuition over the course of their four-year baccalaureate degree program (The University of North Carolina System).
The Hunt Institute Issue Brief
Leaders talked about the importance of continuing to incentivize graduation in four years, making college more affordable for students and families as well as the state. They highlighted the declining birth rate and rising interest in career pathways that don’t require higher education — both of which are impacting the pipeline of students into institutions of higher education. And affordability, leaders noted, doesn’t mitigate the need to continue to assess and reduce institutional costs, performance funding as an incentive, and barriers to access that still exist for students.
The Next NC Scholarship will allow many NC students to go to community college for free
Fostering alignment between education and the workforce
Staff shortages in critical industries — including health care and STEM fields — underscore the need to support students in maximizing the value of their degrees by aligning curricula with workforce demands to close both educational and employment gaps.
The need to foster alignment is even more acute for veterans and justice-involved, unemployed, and underemployed workers, said Dr. Andrea DeSantis with the North Carolina Department of Commerce at the retreat.
Dr. Isaí Robledo, dean of workforce development and community strategies at Randolph Community College, described a recent graduation ceremony held at the federal prison across from the community college to legislators. “Upon release,” he said, “they are skilled and ready to enter the workforce.”
The community college’s small business center, Robledo said, also works with students “to turn their side hustle into their main hustle,” helping them move from worker to employer.
Aligning education and the workforce, he said, comes down to meeting community need.
Dr. Jeff Cox, the president of the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS), said Propel NC, a proposed change in the funding model for community colleges, would ensure the business model of the system positions the 58 community colleges to be responsive to current and future workforce needs in their respective communities.
“We think Propel NC is the most innovative business model across the country,” said Cox.
A look at Propel NC and other legislative priorities for the N.C. Community College System
As EdNC previously reported, the system’s current funding model allocates resources to colleges in proportion to the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) students they enroll in each of their programs. Certain courses receive more state funds than others based on a four-tier funding model.
Propel NC would shift the current FTE funding tiers to “workforce sectors,” with courses ranked and valued by statewide salary job demand data every three years. All curriculum and continuing education courses would reside in the same workforce sector. The NCCCS says this shift “prioritizes connecting students to high-demand, high-wage jobs.”
The workforce sectors would also allow “programs offerings to be better aligned and transparent with business and industry needs,” according to the system’s legislative agenda.
To foster alignment, the NC Center on the Workforce analyzed supply and demand data for key health care jobs
Andy MacCracken, the director of NC Center on the Workforce for Health, discussed a new analysis of health workforce supply and demand data for key health care jobs in North Carolina at the retreat.
The data, he said, include insights from more than 1,000 health care facilities and 80 health education programs across the state.
Moving forward, the center will be able to identify shared needs across employers and work strategically with the community colleges and other institutions of higher education to foster alignment regionally.
For example, MacCracken said, 1 in 6 registered nurse positions are open statewide, but the data shows it’s 1 in 3 in the west and 1 in 5 in the east.
“We can’t just train our way out of this crisis, and we can’t just retain our way out of this crisis,” said MacCracken. To make tangible progress over time, he said, approaches need to be right-sized and tailored to meet local needs.
Artificial intelligence and workforce readiness
At the retreat, legislators discussed the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in industries including finance, law, accounting, and medicine. They were briefed on the current state of AI and best practices in AI in both K-12 and higher education.
To cultivate a skilled workforce ready to thrive in the state’s evolving job market, legislators discussed three policy consideration moving forward:
- How policymakers can ensure AI educational tools are accessible across socioeconomic and geographic student populations,
- The data governance policies needed to protect student privacy and prevent predictive analytics from negatively influencing educational outcomes, and
- The professional development programs needed to train educators to effectively implement AI technology in their pedagogy.
An update on the state of education in Western North Carolina
K-12 and higher education leaders from Western North Carolina came to the retreat to share reflections with legislators on the impact of Hurricane Helene on local schools and communities.
Superintendent Kathy Amos from Yancey County talked about the loss of Micaville Elementary School, a school that had been an anchor institution in the community for decades. Legislators called her leadership and the leadership of the others “heroic.”
Education leaders talked about how the impact of Helene has been exacerbated by the loss of tourism compounding the economic loss and the number of snow days compounding learning loss.
The conversation ranged from infrastructure needs to additional regulatory flexibility to hold harmless support for economic relief to child nutrition.
In Mitchell County, for example, as days when school meals can’t be served rack up because of the weather, leaders said they have lost $238,000 in revenue.
Legislators listened, took notes, repeated back what they heard, and made lists of concrete steps that could help in rebuilding resilient educational institutions supporting learners of all ages.
Holshouser Legislative Retreat has become a model in other states
Javaid Siddiqi, the president and CEO of The Hunt Institute, says the bipartisan model of the legislative retreat was introduced in North Carolina in 2003. The program has grown and is now offered in seven additional states — Virginia, Missouri, West Virginia, North Dakota, Illinois, Ohio, and Oklahoma — with plans to expand into three new states this year, including Alaska, Massachusetts, and New Mexico.
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