Would NC House budget resolve school districts' H-1B visa dependency?

Granville County Public Schools is an example of a rural school district turning to H-1B visas to recruit foreigners to alleviate the teacher shortage

The election of President Donald Trump on an America First platform including the enforcement of immigration laws and the reversal of the previous administration's de facto open border policy has also resulted in increased scrutiny of nonimmigrant visas, such as the H-1B "Specialty Occupations" program.

Under one school of thought, H-1B visas benefit the economy by attracting top talent and filling critical shortages, but skeptics argue that the program is rife with abuse and results in the replacement of Americans with lower-paid foreigners across economic sectors.

Analysis of nearly 60,000 certified H-1B applications in the Greater Triangle area over the past five fiscal years (2020-2024) reveals that although the towns surrounding the RTP core have a high number of tech-related visa applications, many of the applications with the lowest salaries are, in fact, for educational positions which a layman would not colloquially consider "specialty occupations."

For instance, four of the ten applications with the lowest minimum annual salary are for "Teacher" and "School Counselor" positions ($34,150 and $35,360 respectively) at the Granville County Public Schools (GCPS), one of the local school districts which relies on 3rd party contractors recruiting visa applicants to help alleviate the "teacher shortage."

Although the Greater Triangle area contains three of NC's ten largest counties (Wake, Durham, and Johnston) and the accompanying large school districts, the H-1B visa program is most heavily utilized by two of the area's more rural school districts, Granville and Vance, with 73 and 89 applications respectively in the past five years. (Among the other local districts, there were 44 applications for Durham, 33 for Johnston, 8 for Chapel Hill-Carrboro, 5 for Chatham, 3 for Person, 2 for Lee, and 1 for Wake).

Granville County Public Schools

In an interview with This Week in the Triangle, Granville County school board member Danielle Hayes described foreign recruitment as a necessary stopgap measure to fill teacher vacancies, which she attributed to factors such as previous management missteps, the overall lack of teacher candidates, as well as the difficulty in competing with larger better-paying neighboring districts.

Nearly every county supplements the state salary for teachers, but the amount by which they do so varies widely: from $217 in Mitchell County to $10,650 in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools with a weighted average of $6,508, per the 2024 data compiled by the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners. (The state certified teacher salary schedule for the same fiscal year ranged from $39,000 to $67,220 per year depending on the education, certification, and experience of the candidate.)

Although Granville offered a $5,916 supplement for the year, it is bordered to the southwest by Wake, offering $9,828 (the second highest in the state), and to the southeast by Durham with $8,361:

Cap Exemption

The number of H-1B visas is nominally capped at 85,000 per year, which are awarded to applicants via a lottery process. However, nonprofit employers like school districts can bypass the lottery and file for "cap-exempt" H-1B visas with a "Memorandum of Understanding" (MOU) between the district and an "institution of higher education," such as a college or university.

Such an MOU is one of the requirements in the service agreement between GCPS and Global Recruitment, LLC, one of the two contractors used by the district to recruit visa employees (emphasis added):

Additionally, the following information is required from the School District for the attorney to file the H-1B application: (1) a copy of their MOU/MOA from a university describing its affiliation with the university to qualify for the Cap Exemption status; (2) a completed Information About the School District form; (3) a copy of the School District's W-9; and (4) a copy of the School District's EIN that establishes the legal name of the School District. This is necessary for filing a correct LCA with the Department of Labor."

According to the 2023-2024 fee structure attached to the Global Recruitment agreement, the school district agreed to pay $22,500 per teacher recommended for H-1B sponsorship by the contractor as well as an additional $5,000 if the teacher lasts until the next school year, which appears to indicate that the district has paid a minimum of approximately $1,260,000 paid in contractor fees alone for 56 H-1B visas applied for by Global Recruitment's lawyer on behalf of GCPS in the past two years.

Language Barrier

Anecdotally, a recurring complaint from parents of students in North Carolina with foreign teachers is a language barrier preventing adequate communication and learning to occur. (Global Recruitment appears to recruit H-1B applicants primarily or exclusively from the Philippines.)

According to Hayes, GCPS does not administer a standardized English proficiency test to the H-1B applicants, but does still maintain full control of interviewing and selecting out of the candidates they are provided by the contractors.

Hayes also transparently admitted that one of her children struggled with understanding a foreign teacher at a GCPS school, but did credit the responsiveness of the school's administration towards the issue.

Shortages, at their root, are a function of the economic laws of supply and demand.

The demand for teachers is largely "inelastic," meaning that roughly the same number of teachers are needed regardless of whether the cost of teachers is high or low.

The supply of teachers, however, is very much dependent on the compensation offered, though intangible factors such as safety or administration support also play a role.

Although it does not break down specific causes like pay, the most recent report on the State of the Teaching Profession does reveal that the most common cause of attrition is "resigned due to career change," making up 17.15% of the 8,886 teachers who left the North Carolina public schools during the 2023-2024 year. The report also counted up to 7,141.41 vacant positions or partial positions "for which there is not an appropriately licensed teacher who is eligible for permanent employment" for a vacancy rate of 7.61% across the state's public school districts.

On the cost side of the law of supply, a number of school boards in the state including Harnett, Lee, and Granville have sent letters to the legislature this year requesting that the state increase the minimum starting salary for teachers to $50,000, with the Wake County Board of Education reportedly supporting this figure as well.

Republican legislators, including Erin Paré and Mike Schietzelt of Wake County, proposed just such a bill this year in the NC House, H192, which was co-sponsored by a total of 57 representatives including:

• Maria Cervania (D-Wake)

• Sarah Crawford (D-Wake)

• Zack Hawkins (D-Durham)

• B. Ray Jeffers (D-Durham, Person)

• Ya Liu (D-Wake)

• Howard Penny, Jr. (R-Harnett, Johnston)

• Joseph Pike (R-Harnett)

• Renée A. Price (D-Caswell, Orange)

• Donna McDowell White (R-Johnston)

This proposal has been incorporated in to the House's budget plan, announced today, which would raise the starting teacher pay to $48,000 in 2025-2026 and $50,000 in 2026-2027.

On the other hand ,the teacher salary schedule for 2025-2027 in the Senate budget proposal would in fact be a cut, in real terms, as the 1.2% nominal starting salary increase from $41,000 in the 2024-2025 schedule to $41,510 in the proposal is significantly less than the biennial (or even annual) inflation rate. (However, the Senate's proposal does introduce new bonuses which may make up for this loss in purchasing power.)