The GOP legislature is planning to choke the life out of public education, and you need to know what’s happening. Watch Gov. Cooper's special address on public education.
As we continue our unprecedented response to Hurricane Helene, the nation is beginning to understand that impacted areas have been the target of a relentless vortex of disinformation, dialed up by bad actors and platforms like X. 🧵
We need to work together to rebuild and recover from a catastrophic disaster like this one - and spreading false information to sow chaos hurts real people. Politicians, billionaires and grifters who peddle lies during a time of crisis should be held accountable.
The House budget fails public schools while injecting culture wars into classrooms, increasing vouchers for unaccountable private schools, giving even more tax breaks to wealthy people and letting childcare centers fail when they’re needed to help parents get back to work. 1/
House GOP fail to fund the Leandro plan to meet state’s constitutional obligation for a sound basic education for all students. Instead, this budget prioritizes private school vouchers, even over funding early childhood education, competitive teacher pay & building new schools. 2
This budget gives responsibility for setting school curricula to legislative political appointees, making it easier for fringe ideologues to remove core lessons like science, civics & history from the classroom and putting North Carolina on the front lines of the culture wars. 3/
Today, Gov. Cooper is sharing his recommended budget that builds on the state’s success by investing in North Carolina families, businesses and communities. Here are some of the priorities in the Governor's budget, Building on Success:
This budget makes strong investments in the future with funding to increase capacity for new training, adult learning and support for small businesses as they face higher costs and a tight labor market. It's also important that we build our health care workforce.
We know that North Carolina is the best place to do business and this budget will help major employers see their potential here. The budget offers support to small business owners, especially women & minorities, so they can develop and grow, which boosts communities statewide.
Over the past two years, North Carolina and the rest of the world have been through a lot. Personally, I expected many challenges as Governor, but a global pandemic was not one of them. But I knew it was my job to lead, and I have done that to the best of my ability.
Today, we can look forward with the belief that the worst is behind us. As we look ahead, it’s important to take stock of how far we’ve come. Two years ago, the world stopped because of an extraordinarily contagious virus we knew little about.
Throughout this pandemic, we’ve worked to protect people’s lives and livelihoods. In fact, North Carolina has ranked among the lowest states in COVID deaths and job loss per capita.
In the early months when there was almost no PPE or testing & precious little vaccine or effective treatment, we put protections in place like mandatory masking & gathering limits that no doubt saved lives. We got to work. We manufactured & stockpiled PPE. We expanded testing.
As of today, we have 10,276 new COVID cases reported since yesterday. We have 3,008 people currently in the hospital with it; and sadly a total of 19,494 people who have died since this pandemic began.
Before we talk about COVID, I’ll update on the severe weather that we’ve experienced across North Carolina. A strong storm system moved across our state and brought high winds, flooding, downed trees, power outages and snow in some areas.