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CHARLOTTE – Gov. Bev Perdue dropped by West Charlotte High School on Monday afternoon during a jobs tour in the Queen City. She visited three classrooms and heard all about the gains the once troubled school has made over the last five years.

"We're very proud. It's a good community. It's not what people think it is," West Charlotte junior T.J. Mixson said.

In each class, Perdue asked students if they were planning on graduating. In each instance, every hand went up.

She also asked students, if they could be the governor for a day, what schools would need so students can be successful. The answer over and over again was technology. Students said they needed smart boards in every classroom, access to computers and graphing calculators.

"When you're dealing with students who are confronted with the challenge of poverty access to tools like technology present a barrier to them," Principal Shelton Jeffries said.

Another student said she just wanted to be able to take her books home to study, but couldn't in many classes because there are not enough to go around.

Both the lack of technology and the shortage of books are directly linked to a decrease in education funding across the state. To balance her budget, Perdue proposes transferring some costs that the state usually pays for to the county, which means the county will have more expenses that could affect CMS's funding on the back end.

The governor says the state is in a budget crunch and she's looking at the numbers everyday.

“This is the last really bad year I believe we're going to have. Then next year things will be better and we can go back to investing in what's critical to our future, which is education, our kids and keeping people in job training and job skills so we can get jobs for our people,” Perdue said.

The governor says her spending proposal is the first step in what she called a long budget battle.