Michele Rogers desperately hopes the Carroll County Commissioners will increase her property taxes.

If they don’t, class sizes in her local high school could rise to 40 students per teacher next year. She worries that that would make parents in her area of the county flee public schools.

In Harford County, the superintendent may have to cut 167 positions and cancel summer school.

Meanwhile, Baltimore County public schools may need to renegotiate teacher pay after the county executive said there’s no way to give the system what it asked for.

Maryland school leaders are feeling strapped for cash, three years after the passage of a law intended to provide a flush of new money to make the state’s schools some of the best in the nation. But they’re now in the throes of a painful process that’s forcing school systems to reconsider how they spend every dime.

What’s happening is in part by design. Before the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future legislation, every local school system could decide how to spend state money, usually by spreading it around. Now the new law requires school systems to spend more on students who are the farthest behind academically.

The state has decided how much it will cost to educate different kinds of students. A school will get $9,063 next school year for a child who isn’t living in poverty, isn’t special needs or learning English. For children in one of those categories, schools will get double or triple the amount, and the money must be spent in that child’s school.

School system leaders say this is putting them in a bind, and leaving some schools with large budgets and others with not enough. They argue that the minimum amount for each child needs to be adjusted.

In Carroll County, schools in the northern part of the county have lost teachers to the schools with higher needs in the southern part of the county, Rogers said.

“We have to harm one school to help another school, and that is the part that many parents in Carroll County are having a hard time accepting,” Rogers said. Parents want students who need extra help learning to get it, but not at the expense of others, she said.

But the pain hasn’t stopped there. After years of tight budgets, the school system is expected to cut 92 positions to pay for other Blueprint priorities. At two of its high schools, the class sizes will be between 27 and 42 students.

Harford County Superintendent Sean Bulson has become one of the most outspoken advocates for counties feeling the squeeze. “It is becoming the Blueprint for larger class sizes,” he said.

The problem, superintendents say, is that the money districts are getting overall doesn’t keep up with inflation. The Blueprint targets money toward certain programs, but doesn’t pay for increases in other costs, which then fall to local governments. If county-elected leaders don’t pick up the tab, then school systems must cut back.

In the past several years, superintendents and chief financial officers from Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Harford counties say they have seen increases in special education, transportation and utility bills.

“The Blueprint was passed with different financial projections that mostly didn’t take effect until the out years and were developed when the economy was more certain,” said George Sarris, acting chief financial officer for Baltimore County schools.

Those original projections were made in 2018, Bulson said, and didn’t take into account a pandemic.

Staff pay has been one of the largest increases in costs. The Blueprint gave school districts money to increase teacher pay to a minimum starting salary of $60,000. For some school districts, that meant significant teacher pay increases. On top of that, many other employees, from bus drivers to cafeteria workers, argued for increases as well. While school leaders said those increases were necessary, they have been difficult for local governments to fund.

In Baltimore County, for instance, the cost of those increases next year is $61 million, which is part of the $105 million increase the school system is seeking from the county. Superintendent Myriam Rogers has said she may have to renegotiate some of those contracts if the county executive carries out her promise to slash about $70 million from the school system’s proposed budget.

The Blueprint law requires local governments to increase their share of education costs over the next decade, but much of that doesn’t kick in until 2029. In addition, the local dollars must help fund Blueprint priorities.

“The Blueprint is basically locking up all the funds. Every dollar we get from the state causes me to cut something else,” said Bulson, adding that the minimum of $9,063 per student is not enough to educate a child and should be increased faster than the law allows.

That amount would not increase under a bill introduced by Gov. Wes Moore intended to reduce the state’s budget gap in coming years. The bill would freeze the planned increase at that minimum amount for four years at a savings to the state and local governments of about $1.5 billion.

The General Assembly has yet to decide whether to keep those cuts. A final vote on the bill is expected late next week.

Not everyone believes that the problem is the Blueprint.

“We are one of the wealthiest counties in the U.S., and our county government is flat broke,” said Lizz Hammon, a Howard County parent who believes the Blueprint is being made a scapegoat for the failure of the local county government to invest in education.

Without more local funding, she said, “We are going to see major cuts. ... It is going to be really painful.”

Howard County Executive Calvin Ball, in a letter to the school system, pointed out that the county has provided $175 million more than it was required to by law in the past five years, despite a drop in enrollment.

Other county governments have raised the amount spent on schools as well. Anne Arundel County school system’s Chief Financial Officer Matthew Stanski said the county government has been giving significant increases to schools for the last several years, helping to mitigate Blueprint changes, even though it isn’t enough.

“I think the overall pie is just not big enough. That is why you are seeing tough reallocation discussions,” he said. “Inflation around salaries, utilities, health care, transportation. The needs of students are vastly different” than they were when the law was conceived, he said.

Bulson said the state should recalculate a baseline of per-pupil funding, what an acceptable class size is and what an adequate education in the state looks like.

Despite the perception that the Blueprint has significantly ramped up the state’s contribution to k-12 education, the increases aren’t as large as they might seem. As a share of the state’s total budget, the amount spent on kindergarten through 12th grade education is about the same as it was 25 years ago — around 19%.

Even with the turmoil over the school budgets, system leaders aren’t advocating getting rid of the Blueprint. They say they believe in its premise and have seen it start to work.

In Baltimore City, where the Blueprint has been spent adding music, art, advanced academic classes and staff to high-poverty schools, state English test scores have risen faster than in other places. Sandi Jacobs, the city schools’ Blueprint implementation coordinator, said test scores show the state investment in pre-kindergarten has paid off in preparing students to come to kindergarten ready to learn.

In Harford County, one of the lowest-performing schools is now outperforming its peers after Blueprint allocated more resources to it. “We are seeing the results,“ Bulson said.

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.