By Eric Frazier
efrazier@charlotteobserver.com

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, which had warned for months of hundreds of potential layoffs, is headed into next school year planning to employ nearly 500 more school-based staff than last year.

CMS Interim Superintendent Hugh Hattabaugh

School board members called it cause for celebration and evidence of their stewardship in rocky financial times; critics called it proof that the board exaggerated its money woes this spring to ward off deeper cuts in its budget.

CMS released figures Tuesday showing the school system laid off 320 people this year due to budget cuts. None of those layoffs involved teachers.

An additional 184 educators lost their jobs when CMS decided not to renew their contracts, largely for performance issues.

Officials said even with those 504 people losing jobs, better-than-expected state and county support will allow the district to post a net increase in schools of 484 positions over last year.

School board members congratulated their staff Tuesday night as they approved a final budget for 2011-12 of $1.2 billion, an increase of 1.7 percent over last year's budget.

That contrasts sharply with the dire budget situation CMS officials outlined early this year. In January, then-Superintendent Peter Gorman unveiled a preliminary budget that contained $100 million in cuts, including about 1,500 jobs - 600 of them teaching posts.

CMS leaders blame the awkward mechanics of the N.C. school budgeting system, which forces them to estimate how much money they'll get from the state and county before those entities decide.

Interim Superintendent Hugh Hattabaugh said he realizes the suddenly upbeat budget picture could erode confidence in CMS, but called the current situation unavoidable, noting that the state budget picture "changed dramatically from last fall to now."

Mecklenburg commissioner Bill James and other critics have accused the school board of exaggerating its budget troubles to get more money, though James spent much of the budget process accusing CMS of underestimating the severity of the pending state cuts.

State Sen. Bob Rucho, R-Mecklenburg, co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said he felt CMS and other government agencies around the state played politics with budget cuts Republican leaders were drawing up this spring.

Republicans said their budget protected classroom teachers; critics said it would force school systems statewide to let thousands of educators go.

"Everybody said the sky was falling as a scare tactic," he said. "Now look at what reality offers. ... The education system is still functioning quite well."

Gov. Bev Perdue has said big-city school systems like CMS can overcome the cuts, but smaller rural ones will suffer.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board members said they were able to hold onto teaching positions because the state's budget picture improved late in the budgeting process, and because Mecklenburg County officials gave them an additional $26 million.

School board members Tim Morgan and Trent Merchant said CMS drew up its projections last winter after state officials told them to prepare for cuts as deep as 15 percent. CMS planned its budget on a 10 percent to 11 percent state cut, and flat funding from the county.

Ultimately, the state reductions for CMS came in at 6.8 percent, CMS officials say. The school system restored all the planned teacher cuts.

Merchant said the district's budget projections do tend to be cautious; he added that the public would be outraged if the school board found itself coming up short financially in July and scrambling to get schools staffed and open on time.

"I think we ought to be celebrating, not wondering why we didn't fire more people," he said. "We operated on the best information we had."

The school system released the layoff data in response to a request from the Observer for a clearer picture of its staffing situation in the wake of this spring's roller-coaster budget process. CMS issued pink slips to hundreds of teachers, only to later rescind them all when the better-than-expected state and county dollars rolled in.

The school system actually expects to have a net increase of teachers this school year compared to last year, CMS personnel chief Dan Habrat said Tuesday. The data CMS provided shows 145 of the new positions for next year will be teachers, and 164 will be teacher assistants.

The rest of the 484 new positions will all be school-based, CMS spokeswoman LaTarzja Henry said.

With all the layoff-and-rehire shuffling going on, CMS currently is working to fill some 800 vacancies, Habrat said. He added that some of the hiring is generated by the state legislature's decision to pay for more teachers in the early grades.

"CMS is open for hire - big time," he said. "More so than we expected to be."

The figures provided show 693 teachers and other certified instructional support staff were notified of possible job loss due to the budget cuts. All told, CMS notified 1,344 employees of potential layoffs.

Superintendent search

In other action, the board:

Decided in a morning workshop to hire a search firm to help with its search to replace former Superintendent Peter Gorman, who resigned in July.

Unanimously approved a motion to ask Mecklenburg commissioners to amend a county priority list that school board members feel has unfairly reshuffled timetables for school building projects. Among them: the Stumptown Road elementary school project in northern Mecklenburg.

Gave staff the go-ahead to start negotiating leases with community groups that want to lease 10 closed school buildings.

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