Several members of the Stanly County Board of Education voiced frustration and disappointment at the recent decision of Stanly County Commissioners to decline funding of a required 5% match for one or more of four Needs-Based Public School Capital Fund Grant applications.
According to the NC Department of Public Instruction website, the Needs‐Based Public School Capital Fund (NBPSCF) was established to assist counties with their critical public school building capital needs. Grants from the NBPSCF are funded with revenue from the NC Education Lottery, and are available to eligible counties for construction of new school buildings and additions, repairs and renovations of existing school facilities.
The match, for which county funding would have been utilized had the applications been approved, would, according to County Commission Chair Bill Lawhon, have been approximately $8.93 million.
School board members Glenda Gibson, Robin Whitaker and Dustin Lisk, in addition to chairperson Carla Poplin, described the denial as “hurting the students.”
Following the Auxiliary Services report on the meeting agenda Oct. 1, Gibson commented, “It’s disturbing…I felt confident that the commissioners would approve at least one of the four applications.”
Continuing, Gibson recounted from a recent meeting with County Manager Andy Lucas and three commissioners that although the commissioners had requested that a comprehensive plan for school facilities be performed, “they gave us no assurances that action would be taken from the study.”
Lisk added that during the same meeting, commissioners stated that any needs over $60 million would be taken to the voters in a bond referendum.
“(What’s) the point of ordering a full-blown, let’s-look-at-every-building-again study, when there’s been no action taken on these buildings; and coming up with several hundred million dollars that they (commissioners) aren’t going to pay for now, and they’re only going to kick it up to a vote?” he asked.
“In 10 more years when they’ve not done anything, it’s going to be drastically higher,” Lisk said. “It’s a real waste of taxpayer resources.”
“When people ask why we couldn’t get this new school, or why we can’t get this addition, I hope this explains to people that, ‘we tried, and we will not give up,’ ” Gibson added. “But, this (grant) would have helped tremendously.”
Whitaker stated that the public should be aware of the board’s limitations in available funding.
“The public really needs to understand how our capital outlay projects are funded,” she said. “We don’t have tax-levying authority — that comes from the county commissioners — they hold the purse strings, and we have no control over that.”
She also opined that the commission’s refusal to fund the match was more than a “lost opportunity.”
“(Gibson) made the comment that ‘we can’t let opportunities to apply for grants pass us by,’ and (Lisk) said ‘the taxpayers have lost an opportunity.’ The truth is, the county commissioners took that opportunity away from us…they could have signed off on one or any of the applications, but by refusing we now have lost the opportunity to apply. We were doing this to help the taxpayers — this is free money that comes from the state that they would match 5% — and now it’s gone for another year.”
Poplin, the board chair, called the situation “sad.”
“This would have really helped take a piece of the pie out for a very small cost to the taxpayers,” she said. “But who ends up hurting in the end? Our students, and it’s sad.”

Toby Thorpe is a freelance writer for The Stanly News & Press.