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If history is any indication, Mecklenburg voters next month will approve bonds for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, just as they did in 2017, 2013 and 2007.
Those bonds all passed with at least 68% of the vote. The last CMS bond to fail was in 2005.
But there are a few hurdles this year.
One is the size of the request. At $2.5 billion, it’s the largest school bond package in the state’s history.
The 2017 bond was $922 million. There has since been a surge of inflation, with construction costs increasing particularly fast. But a bond package more than doubling in six years has raised concerns about the required property tax increase to pay for it.
There has been a particularly spirited debate in the Black community over the bonds, with the Black Political Caucus supporting them while a group known as the African-American Clergy Coalition is against them. My colleague Ann Doss Helms has good coverage of the back-and-forth.
This issue of Inside Politics is going to look at the vote in a different way: The demographic headwinds CMS is facing.
The first is that CMS is losing market share.
Fifteen years ago, CMS had 81% of all K-12 students in the county.
In 2017, that had fallen to 77% or 147,359 students. Last year, it was down to 71% or a little more than 141,000 students.
The number of students attending charter schools, private schools and being home-schooled is growing.
Will those parents be willing to raise their taxes for school projects that won’t directly benefit their children?
A more significant challenge for CMS is that the fastest-growing student group in the district — Latinos — come from families that rarely vote.
Here are some numbers:
- Last year, Latino students were 29.5% of the CMS population. This year they will almost certainly increase their share, likely pushing past 30%.
- But while they are the second-largest demographic group in CMS (Black students are just under 36%), the political power of Latinos countywide is almost nonexistent.
- In Mecklenburg County, the census estimates that Latinos are 14.4% of the population. But they are less than 6% of registered voters in the county. (Before the 2020 Census, North Carolinians registering to vote could not self-select Hispanic as an ethnicity. That means the actual number of Latinos who are registered to vote is probably higher than 6%.)
- And when you look at actual turnout, the drop-off continues. In last year’s Charlotte election, Latinos were 1.5% of the voters who cast ballots. In the state primary two months earlier, Latinos were 1.6% of the voters in Mecklenburg who cast ballots.
It’s unclear why so few Latinos vote.
English is not the primary language for some Latino families. Some are not citizens.
“(Latinos) just don’t understand the system,” said Wendy Mateo-Pascual, who leads the Latino Civic Engagement Committee. “In a lot of their home countries you don’t have local elections every year. It’s every two years or four years or in some cases every six years.”
She has worked to get more Latinos registered to vote.
School Board member Jennifer De La Jara, who is not running for reelection, is a Spanish speaker whose husband is from Peru.
She acknowledged that Latino turnout has been “extremely low” and said she’s been working to increase Latino engagement by attending events and trying to impress upon people they need to vote.
Her argument for the bonds: “Building schools our children deserve is an easy selling point that breaks away from sometimes more politically divisive topics. Everyone, regardless of ethnic or socio-economic background, can see the condition of CMS’ buildings and get behind supporting high-quality learning facilities for our county’s youth.”