North Carolina Superintendent Mark Johnson has announced that $141 million in grant funds from the Needs-Based Public School Capital Fund will be awarded this year to school districts in Anson, Ashe, Caldwell, Caswell, Cherokee, Columbus, Martin, McDowell, Mitchell, Nash, Swain and Tyrrell counties. The grant awards will allow for construction of new school buildings in these economically distressed areas.

“Through these grants, we will help address our state’s need to replace old, outdated schools with better learning environments,” Johnson said. “This is the second year these funds have been made available to benefit our students and educators who have had to deal with outdated facilities.”

• Anson County: $15 million for initial costs for a new Anson Middle School ($49.4 million total project cost)
• Ashe County: $15 million for a new Ashe County Middle School ($34.9 million total project cost)
• Caldwell County: $15 million for a new Granite Falls Middle School ($20 million total project cost)
• Caswell County: $15 million for a new Bartlett Yancey High School ($32 million total project cost)
• Cherokee County: $15 million for Early College High School, Alternative High School, Career Academy ($20 million total project cost)
• Columbus County, Columbus County Schools: $10.6 million for West Columbus PK-8 ($19.1 million total project cost)
• Columbus County, Whiteville City Schools: $4.3 million for new buildings at Whiteville High School ($21.1 million total project cost)
• Martin County: $5.3 million for a new CTE Center ($7.1 million total project cost)
• McDowell County: $15 million for a new Old Fort Elementary School ($21.2 million total project cost)
• Mitchell County: $15 million for a new grades 3-8 elementary school/middle school ($26.5 million total project cost)
• Nash County, Nash-Rocky Mount: $10 million for a new Red Oaks Elementary School ($20 million total project cost)
• Swain County: $4.7 million for a new building at Swain High School ($7 million total project cost)
• Tyrrell County: $637,000 for Columbia High School/Early College ($850,000 total project cost)

The fund was created by the General Assembly to assist school districts in lower-wealth counties through revenue from the North Carolina Education Lottery. Awards are capped at $15 million per project in Tier 1 (most distressed) counties and $10 million per project in Tier 2 counties. The law requires a local match of $1 for every $3 in grant funds in Tier 1 and $1 for every $1 in Tier 2. The fund was created to assist lower-wealth counties with their critical public school building capital needs.

County applications were reviewed based on priorities provided in the law, including ability to generate revenue, high debt-to-tax revenue ratio, and the extent to which a project will address critical deficiencies in adequately serving the current and future student population.

An emphasis was placed on projects that were far enough along in the planning process that construction could begin within 12 months.

“I thank the General Assembly for making these funds available to help schools in areas that are most in need,” Johnson said. “I look forward to seeing these projects get under way in the coming months.”

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s Office of Charter Schools will receive $23.6 million over five years to help the state’s charter schools meet the needs of economically disadvantaged students. North Carolina is one of eight states to receive the Expanding Opportunities Through Quality Charter School Program grants from the U.S. Department of Education.

The funding, which totals $10.4 million for the federal fiscal year that began Monday, will be used for sub-grants to new and existing charter schools to:

• Assist new charter schools that will serve a large economically disadvantaged student population in their planning year
• Assist charter schools in their first three years of operation that serve a large, economically disadvantaged student population
• Assist high-quality charter schools that serve a large economically disadvantaged population and want to replicate
• Assist high-quality charter schools that want to expand to serve a larger economically disadvantaged population

“North Carolina’s charter schools should be laboratories of innovation, proving grounds for ideas that can be scaled across all our schools and all student populations,” said State Superintendent Mark Johnson. “This funding will allow schools to better serve our students in the most need and increase the diversity of students served by charter schools.”

North Carolina has 185 operating charter schools this school year, and eight more schools plan to open next year. Charter schools are governed by a nonprofit board and must accept all eligible students who apply, holding a lottery for seats if the school is oversubscribed.

“I am excited that North Carolina was awarded this highly competitive grant from the Department of Education,” said Dave Machado, head of the state Office of Charter Schools. “This grant will help us promote high-quality schools and open more schools in the underserved rural areas of North Carolina.”

The Expanding Opportunities Through Quality Charter School Program grants, called CSP grants by the federal agency, are in their second year under the Every Student Succeeds Act. CSP grants have been awarded to aid charter schools since the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, but the focus has changed under ESSA, with different eligibility requirements, priorities, definitions, application requirements, and selection criteria.

The application deadline for charter school boards interested in applying will be early spring, with grants to be awarded by the end of the school year. The State Board of Education will approve the grants based on recommendations from the Charter School Advisory Board.

Hurricane Florence’s torrential rains pelted parts of North Carolina that are home to more than 1,500 industrial animal operations with over 1,000 nearby waste storage cesspools. These operations have the potential to annually produce as much as 4 billion gallons of wet swine waste and 400 thousand tons of dry poultry litter, an exclusive analysis by EWG and Waterkeeper Alliance reveals.

The organizations overlaid locations of concentrated animal feeding operations with government rainfall estimates to produce an interactive map that details Florence’s potential impact on vulnerable operations in the state. Clicking and zooming in on a location shows the estimated amount of rain each operation received from Sept. 14, when Florence made landfall, through Sept. 16, and the potential amount of waste produced or stored at each site.

The groups calculated the potential waste stored at each site by using North Carolina permit data, the USDA Agricultural Census, and manure production rate data from the North Carolina Agricultural Chemicals Manual. A link to the methodology is here.

Among our findings:

• There are 926 concentrated hog feeding operations housing over 3.8 million pigs and 578 industrial poultry operations holding an estimated 35 million poultry in areas where the National Weather Service said flooding was “occurring or imminent” after Florence. Livestock at those 1,504 concentrated animal feeding operations are capable of producing 4 billion of gallons of wet waste and over 400,000 tons of dry litter each year. More than a third of those sites received an estimated 15 to 19 inches of rain, and more than one-fourth saw more than 20 inches.
• There are 123 hog industrial hog operations and 40 industrial poultry operations in or within 500 feet of the 100-year floodplain that received at least 15 inches of rain. Livestock at those 163 sites are capable of producing more than 395 million gallons of liquid waste and more than 27,000 tons of dry waste a year.
• Federal standards require waste pits in North Carolina to be designed to withstand a so-called 24-hour/25-year rain event without releasing manure. In areas where the National Weather Service said flooding was occurring or imminent, more than 1,000 waste pits received more rain than the 24-hour/25-year rain event defined for that location. Of those, an estimated 35 pits are in the 100-year floodplain and received over 15 inches of rain. Those pits alone are capable of holding more than 129 million gallons of animal waste.
• The map below shows colored bands of estimated rainfall amounts in North Carolina’s coastal plain from Sept. 14-16. The dark diagonal lines show the zones of rainfall expected during a 24-hour/25-year rain event. In all of the zones except for the one with the lowest expected rainfall (in blue), the total estimated rainfall was well in excess of what the waste pits were designed to withstand.

Source: EWG, from National Weather Service data

“It’s just a matter of time until another massive rain event happens again in the floodplain,” said Soren Rundquist, Director of Spatial Analysis at EWG. “How many scenes of swamped animal barns and breached manure pits do state leaders and the factory farm industry need to see before they realize producing and storing billions of pounds of animal waste in flood-prone areas was and is a bad decision?”

“Waste mismanagement at industrial animal agriculture operations threatens public health and environmental quality under sunny skies,” said Will Hendrick, staff attorney and manager of the Pure Farms, Pure Waters campaign at Waterkeeper Alliance. “That threat is disproportionately borne by communities of color or low wealth and it is exacerbated, given the concentration of production in the coastal plain, by increasingly frequent and severe storms like Hurricanes Matthew and Florence.”

EWG and Waterkeeper Alliance will continue our analysis of Hurricane Florence’s impact on CAFOs in North Carolina’s coastal plain.