The Data Center Vote is a School Vote

Charlotte should pause, consider impacts on communities of color and schools, then make better rules for data centers.

Today, Monday June 8th, the Charlotte City Council votes on whether to pause new data center development for 150 days. Just two weeks ago our school board made difficult decisions to pass a budget with a greater emphasis on student social and emotional supports. These votes about the school budget and data center development may seem unrelated, but they’re actually linked; both shape the health and learning conditions of our kids now and the long-term arc of Charlotte’s future.

I'm the parent of students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and a member of Public School Strong, where we organize for schools that are strong, safe, healthy, equitable, and supportive. 

Consider what the school board just did. In a time of increasingly scarce dollars for public schools, it prioritized funding for what kids need in order to learn and thrive: mental-health and social-emotional services for students, social-services liaisons, and extra support for our highest-need schools, including Hidden Valley Elementary on the southern edge of University City. 

Now lay the data center map over those neighborhoods where our schools need the most support. You will see a lot of overlap. Charlotte has never once done a racial equity analysis on where these hyperscale data centers land. We are talking about concentrating industrial-scale infrastructure in the very communities our public schools are working so hard to serve.

The people pitching data centers say they aim to benefit our communities. But goodwill is not a plan, and a press release is not a standard we should use for permitting.

Tax breaks for data centers drain school funding while corporations profit. Good Jobs First report, Cloudy with a Loss of Spending Control: How Data Centers are Endangering State Budgets, shows at least 10 states have already lost more than 100 million per year in tax revenue to data centers subsidies. In 2025, Texas, alone, lost nearly $1 billion, making it one of the costliest corporate subsidy programs in the country.

When corporations receive massive tax breaks, school communities pay the price. K-12 school districts spend nearly $8 billion annually on energy costs, the second largest expense after teacher salaries. At the same time, aging facilities and chronic underfunding have resulted in deferred maintenance of facilities. Funding that could support better teacher pay, additional supports for students, and school infrastructure instead go towards subsidizing private industry. The consequences are felt in our kids' classrooms everyday. Schools struggle to repair leaky roofs, upgrade HVAC systems and invest in clean energy like solar panels; further, critical supports for students with special needs are still largely absent. 

At a time when we should be focused on making schools safe, healthy and supportive places to learn, building data centers near our public schools puts our kids at even further risk. School communities near these developments face increased air pollution, noise pollution, depletion of water resources (at a time when Charlotte has drought advisories), rising heat, and toxic respiratory concerns. For students learning near these toxic facilities they disrupt learning, worsen preexisting health conditions, and have even been linked to premature death, in a recent study published by Piedmont Environment Council. Black and brown students, students from low-income families, and students with disabilities who often rely most heavily on their local public school ultimately bear the heaviest burden.

By the city's own account, every data center - whether a server closet or a 200-megawatt campus - is treated identically under our rules and can be built by right in eight zoning districts without real review. That's how the PowerHouse campus, made up of five buildings on 122 acres and drawing enough electricity for hundreds of thousands of homes, can rise near schools like University Meadows Elementary under the same rules as a server closet.

Hyperscale facilities are known for low long-term job creation and uncertain tax revenue, while consuming resources our schools and communities depend on. We already hand big tech our children's data, and have been burned when they've been careless with it. Why extend them unquestioning trust over our water, our grid, and our neighborhoods?

Across Charlotte people are saying, pause data center development! We need to conduct a thorough equity analysis and understand who will be most impacted, then write the standards. 150 days is not a ban. It's what state law plainly allows: stop, learn, consider, and write rules that fit the scale of what's needed and what reflects our communities’ values and priorities.

On Monday, the Council isn't only voting on data centers. It's voting on whether our investments make our kids’ living and learning environments safe, healthy and well resourced. We can pause, study it, and get it right together. Our kids will be watching and impacted.