Parents may barely have heard of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, but the expansive changes to public education are already shaping their children’s lives in school.

Parents are seeing more spots available in public prekindergarten, putting thousands of dollars back in their pockets. Their children’s teachers are better paid. They soon may see class sizes rise or fall dramatically, depending on where their kids go to school. And their high schoolers are being held to a higher standard, but have more opportunities to take college-level classes and pursue careers.

Two years into the popular $4.4 billion-a-year plan, educators in every school district are finding their priorities reordered, sometimes in ways they hadn’t expected. The new money — a $3.7 billion increase in state funding and the remainder in local increases — is funding a local wish list of improvements, but it is also forcing them to cut things parents often like.

Behind the scenes, pitched battles are being fought between school system leaders and the state over the fine print, with some local leaders already calling for legislative changes.

“The Blueprint calls for transformational change in the way we were doing things,” said William ‘Brit’ Kirwan, who chaired the panel that created the framework for legislation passed several years ago. ”These are very significant, profound changes. Change is difficult. It is not in people’s DNA.”

With its students ranking on national tests in the middle of the pack nationally, the state is hoping to target money on specific areas it thinks will improve public schools and make the state’s public schools some of the best in the country. For the first time, there’s also accountability for the state funding they are getting. If local school systems don’t spend the money in the ways they are supposed to, the state can withhold funds.

Maryland State School Superintendent Carey Wright said there are already signs of progress, including better early childhood education and an increase in the number of community schools. Those are schools with a high percentage of students living in poverty that offer additional support, such as full-time nurses and social workers. In the coming school year, Wright said the state will go from 459 community schools to 619.

The Blueprint had strong support from local leaders when it passed the legislature. Parents and educators lobbied hard for the bill in Annapolis. But now Kirwan said he worries there’s a gap in the lip service for the plan and “the real hard work that is going to be required to get it implemented properly.”

Another sticky problem is how the state will pay for it. The Blueprint legislation requires that funds to local schools increase gradually over a decade. The state is expected to have enough money to cover the cost of the Blueprint until fiscal year 2027.

Here are some of the areas the Blueprint has primed for change in the coming years.

Public prekindergarten

Local and state education leaders are now arguing over exactly who will be paying how much for a huge expansion into public prekindergarten.

When the Blueprint was written, legislators recognized that expanding public schooling to prekindergarten students would better prepare students to learn to read and do math by grade 3. In Baltimore, elementary schools usually have empty classrooms that can be turned into prekindergarten classrooms; many growing school systems don’t have the space, and building an addition to every elementary school is expensive.

“It is not that anyone is opposed to doing that, but it is finding the space and the teachers,” Wright said. The Blueprint calls for public education funding to pay for existing prekindergarten spots in privately run pre-Ks.

There’s other sticky questions around those publicly-funded, private prekindergarten schools, including what teacher training and certifications their educators will need and what rules they must follow.

Money that follows the student

In the past, school systems directed the funds from state and local sources where they wanted, often spreading the money equally around to schools. Over the next two years, this is changing.

The Blueprint requires that 75% of the state funds follow the student to their school. A student who is learning English as a second language, who is economically disadvantaged or is in special education classes, will get additional money. So a school with mostly middle-class students and few with special needs will get far fewer dollars than schools with a high percentage of students in need.

That simple financing formula change is upending school district budgets across the state. Strictly followed, parents in a middle-class neighborhood with few students who don’t speak English might see class sizes rise significantly, while parents in a high-poverty school might see class sizes fall dramatically. Cecil County projected last year that if it had to implement the 75% rule, one school with higher-income students could lose more than $1 million, while another school with English language learners and students living in poverty would gain that amount or more.

Maryland educators have all agreed that schools with high concentrations of high-needs students should get more money to create equity, but some are now arguing that the gap is too large. A middle-class student might be worth only $6,500, while a high-needs student with disabilities could be worth $26,000.

Even in Baltimore, where a high percentage of students living in poverty means a significant increase in funding for those schools, CEO Sonja Santelises said she believes that her district would benefit from adjustments. Just $6,500 per student is too low. “It does need to be increased,” she said, but added that she does not want that adjustment to come at the expense of decreased funding for poor students.

Even some state education leaders have begun to question it. “We will have to see if we have gotten it right. If there have to be adjustments made on that, we will be ready to do that,” said Kirwan

Because school districts don’t have as much say in how they spend their money, some are finding that suddenly they don’t have it available for items they used to consider staples of a well rounded education.

One of the places this is being felt is Frederick County, where superintendent Cheryl L. Dyson said last year class sizes went up slightly to make sure teachers could get raises. And parents became alarmed when elementary school instrumental music and other programs were on the chopping block.

“There were several areas where our students and our families appreciated having access to additional programs or resources. We had to take a hard look and say, ‘Can we afford that, knowing the expectation of Blueprint?’”

Advanced coursework, with a catch

Parents of high school students may begin to see new opportunities for their children to pursue more advanced coursework at either their high school or a community college. The Blueprint encourages — and helps pay for — students to work toward certifications that will help them earn a livable wage right out of high school. Students can also earn an associate’s degree by the time they graduate from high school.

“The number of kids taking those classes was increasing at a fast pace,” Wright said. The cost to local school systems was rising, too. So the state agreed to pay for more courses, two in the spring and two in the fall, for each student. After that, local funding must kick in. So students in counties that won’t pay for additional courses may have limited options.

The catch to taking advanced-level classes is that students must have passed state English and math tests or maintained a certain grade point average by the end of 10th grade. Right now, only about 60% of 10th graders are meeting that standard.

Better paid and supported teachers

The Blueprint attempts to draw greater numbers of smart, capable young people into careers in public education by increasing the beginning teacher salary to $60,000 a year by July 2025 and giving teachers more time in the school day to plan their lessons and work with their peers.

When it takes effect in a couple of years, 60% of a teacher’s time will be spent delivering their lessons to students and 40% will be spent in planning and collaborations with other educators in their school. That 60/40 split is giving some superintendents and school boards heartburn, because they will need to hire hundreds more teachers during a time of shortage.

When the legislation was first passed, local leaders thought they would be able to count 10 professional days, when students aren’t in school but teachers are, as part of the 40%, but the state has said no, according to Mary Pat Fannon, executive director of the Public School Superintendents’ Association of Maryland. Parents of elementary and middle school students may see a shift in their child’s classroom schedules to allow teachers more planning time, Fannon said.

New “career ladders” are being created that base a teacher’s pay not just on the number of years they have worked, but their performance. The Blueprint gives a $10,000 yearly boost to teachers who get a national certification and another $7,000 a year to teach in schools with a high percentage of economically disadvantaged students. Most of the school systems have finished negotiating those contracts with teachers unions, Wright said.

Corrections: A previous version of this story misstated the county where Cheryl L. Dyson is superintendent. Dyson is superintendent of Frederick County Public Schools. The story also misstated the annual cost of the Blueprint for Maryland's Future. The Blueprint costs $4.4 billion annually.

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.