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Student teacher Lana Scott teaches a small group of kindergartners the alphabet at Whitehall Elementary School in Bowie on Jan. 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson)
Schools blueprint funding seen as top education issue before Md. legislature
Helping Maryland’s counties afford their share of the Blueprint, the landmark plan to revamp the state’s public schools and early childhood programs, will be the No. 1 education issue before the General Assembly in 2024, Senate Majority Leader Nancy J. King said.
The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, passed by the legislature in 2021, increases education funding by $3.8 billion annually for 10 years, with the cost borne by the state, the 23 counties and Baltimore City. Among other provisions, the law requires that all public school teachers be paid at least $60,000 a year starting in 2026. That’s only one of the funding issues that some county officials say could break their budgets.
“We’re hearing from rural counties that they just can’t afford to participate,” said King, D-Montgomery, chair of the Education, Business and Administration Subcommittee. “A lot of it is paying teachers.”
Michael Sanderson, executive director of the Maryland Association of Counties, or MACo, said Blueprint funding is one of the top priorities for county leaders.
“This is on everybody’s mind,” he said. “Some counties have already felt it, others will feel it this coming year or a year or two down the road. Everybody has that reckoning coming. It’s an ambitious program with really important goals but a serious price tag.”
The Blueprint law’s funding requirements force county leaders to make painful choices, Sanderson said: “Imagine the difficulty for counties, when they also have to focus on public safety and public health and all those other really large priorities.”
In a November letter to Gov. Wes Moore and legislative leaders, Sanderson and Calvin Ball, Howard County executive and MACo president, appealed for flexibility for counties in making Blueprint reforms.
“In many ways, the Blueprint applies a one-size-fits-all approach to education investment and implementation that does not account for our state’s diverse local government capacities, processes, and abilities,” they wrote. “As we move deeper into implementation, the diverse systems, constraints, and structures counties must work within become more apparent, especially financially.”
Harford County Executive Bob Cassilly criticized legislators for not attaching a funding mechanism to the Blueprint, also known as the Kirwan plan, after the commission whose recommendations form the backbone of the education law.
“There’s a military adage: A plan without funding is an illusion,” said Cassilly, an Army veteran. “We don’t want the Kirwan illusion; we want the Kirwan plan. Funding should have been an integral part of this.”
In addition to the Blueprint’s outright tab for counties, Cassilly pointed to what he called its unrecognized costs. One is “salary compression,” the upward pressure on teacher pay when the $60,000 base salary takes effect.
“Would you have a teacher who’s been there for five years make the same as a new teacher?” Cassilly asked. “That’s got to go up or you lose experienced teachers.”
Cassilly also noted the Blueprint requirement that teachers have time away from the classroom for planning and meetings, which he said meant more personnel would need to be hired.
“If teachers are out of the room, somebody has to be in the room,” he said. “It’s not the same as not mowing as many fields because my parks and rec budget went down. I can’t leave kids sitting in a classroom.”
Likewise, Cassilly said legislators who mandated early childhood education for all 3 and 4 year olds did not factor in the cost of building or renovating space to meet the state’s criteria for those classrooms.
“There are all these unrecognized costs,” Cassilly said. “You give a goal but you don’t ascribe a cost to it. What are the true costs?”
MACo’s Sanderson said the Blueprint’s pre-K provisions illustrate the problems with the overall program. In particular, he pointed to the expectation that a significant percentage of private childcare providers would become pre-K educators.
“The Kirwan Commission believed that if we put more carrots out there, they would become fully accredited education providers,” Sanderson said. “That hasn’t happened.”
The Blueprint provisions were drawn up before the pandemic, noted Brianna January, MACo’s associate policy director.
“The context was different,” January said. “We saw childcare providers closing up shop right and left.”
Three years into the Blueprint, the pre-K situation is “an easy illustration of why you need some nip and tuck in the program,” Sanderson said. “We literally don’t have places to put the literal desks and seats that we would need to provide pre-K.”
In the Eastern Shore’s Kent County, Ronald Fithian, president of the Board of County Commissioners, said that to comply with the Blueprint, the county would have to increase its per-pupil annual expenditure by 65% between fiscal years 2023 and 2034.
Such an increase would require a 5-cent property tax increase every year for seven to eight years in a row, solely for education, he said.
“We want to be team players,” Fithian said of Kent County’s obligation to fund the Blueprint. “But when it gets to this point you have to say no. I hope it doesn’t come to that, honest I do.”
King said legislators had agreed to keep the Blueprint unchanged for the first year or two “to see how it would shake out.”
Now, after hearing from counties stretched thin, King said legislators “have to put (their) heads together to figure out how to make this work.”
“My goal is to make it fair for every county,” King continued. “I believe that legislators on both sides of the aisle absolutely agree with the goals of what the Blueprint does.”
Nevertheless, Blueprint funding is a “huge concern” for counties, she said: “There are other priorities besides the Blueprint and (counties need) to be able to spend the money where it needs to be spent.”
