About a month after finalizing a budget for next school year that included increasing some class sizes, county school officials are bracing for the loss of another $10 million and the potential for deeper cuts during next year’s budget process.
County Executive Ike Leggett’s $51 million “budget savings plan” includes $10 million less for Montgomery County Public Schools for the upcoming school year.
To make matters more difficult, Interim Superintendent Larry Bowers this week predicted about $125 million more “in additional reductions” for the fiscal year 2017 budget that would impact the 2016-2017 school year.
During a Board of Education discussion on the budget Tuesday, board President Patricia O’Neill said the school system must deal with the “sobering reality” that the best-case scenario for next year is a “do no harm” budget—not the addition of school-based staff positions some are hoping for.
Just last month, after getting $53 million less than requested from the county’s budget, the school system decided to hold back 341 school-based positions for the 2015-2016 school year. It will mean small class-size increases in some schools, despite an overall $2.32 billion schools budget that makes up about half of the county’s overall budget.
Leggett and the County Council chose to fund the school system at the minimum level required by the state’s Maintenance of Effort law, which establishes a minimum per-pupil funding standard for future years.
Bowers, assuming the county will again fund the school system at the state minimum next spring, projected the $125 million in additional reductions.
As for the $10 million Leggett is requesting the school system cut now, Bowers told the council’s Education Committee on Monday that MCPS “is prepared to do whatever we need to do to work with you on this.”
While the school system likely won’t know where it can cut until the school year starts, Bowers indicated that any cuts needed to achieve the $10 million target wouldn’t come from more cuts to staffing allocations.
“We’re basically going to ask all our offices and departments to rebuild their budgets and go back to scratch,” Bowers said, “to get us through this year.”
Council members on the committee said they wouldn’t approve budget cuts that could lead to more class-size increases.
“I’m done with class-size increases,” council member Marc Elrich said. “We’ve gotten to a place we’ve never wanted to be and I don’t see the value of going deeper in that. I don’t think it’s going to work.”
Council member Craig Rice, who chairs the committee, said he’d like to take a look at changing the county’s structure for school impact fees paid by residential developers—something he said could provide more money for the school system’s budget in 2016-2017.
“I know that all of my developer friends get nervous when they hear me talk about changes in impact taxes, but the reality is we’re going to have to find this,” Rice said.
