The Montgomery County school board unanimously approved Tuesday afternoon a $3.6 billion fiscal year 2026 operating budget for Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), moving forward with a spending plan that funds 98.4% of the board’s initial request to the county.
“We recognize that this has been a challenging budget process with shifts in state and federal funding as well as [the] county’s changing economic landscape,” Board President Julie Yang said during the Tuesday meeting in Rockville. “As a board we have approached this process with a focus on our established priorities that directly impact student outcomes.”
On May 22, the Montgomery County Council approved a $7.6 billion county spending plan for fiscal year 2026, which begins July 1. The $3.65 billion designated for MCPS in the county budget represented about 99.8% of what the school board requested and was the largest spending plan ever approved for the district.
Technical changes increased what had first appeared to be a $8.6 million budget gap to $9.6 million and reduced the total MCPS budget to $3.6 billion, according to MCPS officials.
The final budget fulfilled reductions to help close the gap between what the board requested from the county and what it received.
The list of reductions includes:
- A $3.3 million reduction to the initial $5.8 million requested for an equity add-on formula to create parity in materials provided to schools;
- Cutting funding for hiring new special education teachers by $2.8 million, reducing the number of requested new positions from 186 to 156;
- Reducing by $2.5 million the $9 million requested for maintenance;
- A roughly $420,000 reduction in funding for additional security assistants, reducing the number of new positions from 52 to 45;
- Cutting about $998,000 from funding for insurance and the employee benefit plan;
- Cutting $800,000 in proposed licensing of a middle school STEM curriculum;
- Cutting $500,000 from $3.7 million requested for Chromebook repairs; and
- Cutting $250,000 for a proposal to study academic programs.
The final budget also includes an additional $1.3 million to restore several Emergent Multilingual Learner positions in the district’s central office that had been cut during an administrative reorganization. Another $600,000 was added to assess special education and talent management.
The final MCPS budget is $273.2 million more than the current $3.32 billion operating budget for fiscal year 2025, which ends June 30 – an 8.2% increase. The district will receive $210 million more from the county when compared to fiscal year 2025, which is $216 million more than the state law’s maintenance of effort, the required minimum level of per-pupil funding that must be maintained by county governments year over year.
MCPS is also receiving $63.7 million more from the state government when compared to its funding for fiscal year 2025, for a total of roughly $1 billion from the state for fiscal year 2026.
The budget includes $186 million to increase staff base wages by 3.25%, $44 million to add 659 special education positions, $2.8 million to add 45 security positions and $4.3 million to add 47 Emergent Multilingual Learner educator positions.
The budget also includes about $2.5 million to create an “equity add-on” to the formula for school materials based on the populations of students who qualify for Free and Reduced Meals (FARMS), a measure of poverty; special education students; and Emergent Multilingual Learners.
According to school board documents, the $3.6 billion fiscal year 2026 budget approved by the council was about $59.7 million less than the tentative $3.65 billion operating budget the board approved Feb. 4.
To offset a majority of that cut from the requested budget, the MCPS and the council announced a plan May 13 that would reallocate money that would have been added to the school system’s retiree health benefit trust.
The plan would allow the school system to use some of the money that is typically reserved for the future to fulfill current employee health benefit needs. Specifically, this plan would allow MCPS to receive an additional $50 million – $25 million in fiscal years 2025 and 2026 — by increasing the school system’s annual draw down from the retiree health benefit trust.
The plan doesn’t remove funding from the trust; instead, it lowers the amount of money MCPS will put into the trust this fiscal year and the next, according to MCPS officials. The district also cut about $108,000 from a special revenue fund that supports the district’s television services.
The budget approval process for fiscal year 2026 was less contentious than it has been in years past. For fiscal year 2025, MCPS endured a difficult budget season in the spring of 2024 in which the school board had to make significant spending cuts. The cuts were needed to close a spending gap after the council approved a fiscal year 2025 MCPS operating budget that was $30.5 million less in spending than the school board requested. That budget represented the most funding that MCPS had ever received from the county until the fiscal year 2026 budget was approved.
