Guilford County Schools faces staffing shortages as budget battles intensify

Guilford County Schools entered the 2025-26 school year with fewer than 15 teacher vacancies, but about 70 bus driver openings still left the district wrestling with the kind of staffing gaps that can ripple from classroom schedules to family routines across Guilford County.

The district has said bus driver shortages can mean route delays and longer rides for children, while teacher assistant vacancies can leave struggling students with less individualized support. Even as the district reported fewer classroom openings than a year earlier, local educators and officials have continued to warn that staffing instability is becoming a workforce problem as much as a school system problem, one that affects whether families and employers see Guilford County as a place that can reliably support daily life.

The pressure has fed into a larger budget fight. In March 2025, Guilford County Schools proposed a $947.2 million budget for 2025-26, including about $314 million from Guilford County, a 16% increase from the prior year. The plan also set aside $10 million for teacher supplements, part of a broader effort to retain staff and sustain academic recovery work after the pandemic. Later, Guilford County commissioners approved a 2025 budget that increased GCS funding by $12.3 million over the previous year, with $4.8 million earmarked for specific uses, including $3 million to increase salaries.

That tension is now carrying into the 2026-27 budget cycle. Superintendent Whitney Oakley presented a five-year budget plan on March 10 focused on salaries, technology and safety, and the Guilford County Board of Education voted April 14 to send her recommendation to county commissioners unchanged. The district’s local funding request totals $313,612,365, while the recommended operating budget stands at $868,959,927. County commissioners are expected to make the final decision around mid-June.

GCS leaders have argued that recurring state support is needed to improve wages for teachers and classified workers, including teacher assistants, custodians and bus drivers. They have also pointed to High Dosage Tutoring and Learning Hubs as part of the district’s recovery strategy, saying students are improving at rates higher than the state and national average. The district has reported a 13.2% decrease in low-performing schools over three school years.

That progress now sits beside a stubborn reality: even a district with fewer teacher vacancies than before still cannot function smoothly without enough people to drive buses, support classrooms and keep schools running. In Guilford County, the budget debate is no longer just about dollars on paper; it is about whether Greensboro, High Point and the rest of the county can keep schools stable enough to hold onto families, workers and the employers that depend on them.