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Forsyth County board approves 2025 legislative priorities emphasizing student safety and mental health
Summary
The Forsyth County Board of Education unanimously approved legislative priorities for 2025 asking the state to fully fund the Quality Based Education formula, strengthen information sharing of discipline records, fund school safety and mental health supports, and cover training costs for new literacy mandates.
The Forsyth County Board of Education voted unanimously to approve its 2025 legislative priorities, asking the state legislature to increase funding and policy support for school safety, mental health and the district’s program needs.
Superintendent Young presented the priorities and said the board’s requests are aligned with the district’s strategic plan. Key requests include full funding for Quality Based Education (QBE) and capital outlay formulas, measures to protect local autonomy in funding calculations, state funding to lower student-to-counselor ratios toward the nationally recommended 250-to-1 level, and funding for school safety measures including training, mental-health support and crisis response.
The board also asked the legislature to remove barriers to sharing information about student behavior, criminal background and discipline records between schools and across jurisdictions. "We want to urge our legislators to try to remove some of the restraints that are on the sharing and flow of information," Superintendent Young said, adding the request followed "what brought that to a head was the tragedy in Burrow County" and that the county had "lost 2 of our 2 of our students" in the previous week.
Other requests included advocating for funding for Student Advocacy Specialists (SAS) and school resource officers (SROs); the superintendent noted the district currently has at least one SRO in every school and that the SAS program is intended to provide proactive student supports. The board asked the legislature to require that when new state-mandated programs are introduced, funding be provided to cover the cost of effective implementation; as an example, the superintendent said dyslexia and literacy legislation required 25 to 30 hours of teacher training without dedicated state funding.
Board members described the priorities as focused on practical needs rather than abstract goals and encouraged public engagement with legislators. The motion to approve the priorities passed unanimously.
