Five years ago, Wes Moore sat at a dark wooden desk in a cavernous hearing room and explained to lawmakers why they should approve an ambitious and expensive plan to improve public schools.

Moore wasn’t yet governor, or even running for the job. He was a nonprofit executive, focused on ensuring that children in poor jurisdictions got enough funding to achieve success in school. His name was called about halfway through a six-hour hearing.

“I’m asking that you not tell our most vulnerable and our most systemically underserved communities to pay for their own poverty,” Moore told the assembled group of delegates and senators. “That every jurisdiction must have skin in the game, but communities with the greatest need for these reforms are being asked to pay the most to get services desperately needed in every school and in every community, and that’s not fair.”

Fast-forward five years, and Moore is now the governor with different ideas for implementing that ambitious education plan, known as the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.

Moore is asking lawmakers to approve a revamp of significant parts of the program, including changes that would result in the poorest students missing out on planned extra funding to trim costs.

Lawmakers will consider the governor’s request during a high-profile hearing on Wednesday, a significant moment for Moore’s most ambitious — and most controversial — proposal during his time as governor.

“We have to make sure that it’s implemented sustainably and in a way where all jurisdictions are part of the process,” Moore said in an interview Friday.

The Democratic governor said he’s “working in close partnership” with lawmakers, but he won’t make his case in person, as he did five years ago.

Though Moore testified for his top priorities during his first two legislative sessions as governor, he’s yet to make an appearance before lawmakers so far this year.

“I know the General Assembly is also clear on where I stand on it,” Moore said of his bill.

Here’s where Moore says he stands: The goals of the Blueprint remain laudable and a priority. But things have changed in five years — in society and in educational best practices — and this is a moment to make adjustments.

Another factor that Moore doesn’t usually bring up is that the state is facing both a short-term and a long-term projected budget shortfall. While there’s enough money to pay for the Blueprint programs for the next couple years, the plan does contribute to the long-term projected gap.

In speeches and interviews, Moore often gives Social Security — a measure that’s been amended many times — as an example of a good law needing tweaks.

“The point is this: You can put together a robust plan, but you have to be smart, saying if adjustments need to be made to make sure that the plan is actualized and that it can be sustainable, then make adjustments,” Moore said last month.

Rollbacks and additions

Moore’s proposal rolls back some elements of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future while also adding new initiatives. Between the cutting and the adding, the net savings to the state would be about $107 million in the next budget year, growing to $666 million four years from now.

The central part of his plan puts a pause on a program to give teachers more “collaborative time” — out-of-the-classroom time for lesson planning, working with other teachers and sharpening their skills.

The challenge with granting teachers more collaborative time is that it takes more teachers to cover all the classes. And with Maryland experiencing a teacher shortage, it’s difficult to implement.

Pausing the collaborative time would save the state $759 million over four years, according to Moore’s team.

But because of the way that funding formulas are structured, pausing collaborative time means that there also would be decreases in planned spending to help schools teach kids who are in high-poverty schools or who are learning English.

Other cuts to the Blueprint include freezing financial support for community schools, which offer extra services such as counseling and health care to families in high-poverty neighborhoods, as well as freezing funding for a program aimed to improve mental health services for students.

Some of the savings would be rerouted into new or expanded programs to recruit new teachers, to train teachers to become principals and to hire statewide literacy and math coaches to help teachers improve their skills.

Moore is facing pushback to his plan.

School system leaders in Baltimore City and Baltimore County have estimated that their schools will miss out on hundreds of millions of dollars of funding over the next four years that had been promised to them.

The state teachers union and some Democratic lawmakers have also said they’re not on board with reducing funding to teach the students with the greatest needs.

Already, Del. Vanessa Atterbeary, chair of one of the committees reviewing the bill, said “I 100% disagree” with cutting the extra funding for educating poor students. And Senate President Bill Ferguson said this week that those cuts are “a nonstarter.”

The parts of the bill that seek to boost training and recruiting teachers are good, said Sean Johnson, executive director of the Maryland State Education Association, the state’s main teacher union.

But much of Moore’s bill gets to “the core of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future,” which Johnson described as programs that attempt to address: “How are we going to help improve academic outcomes for students that need the most help?”

Johnson said he’s hopeful that the teachers’ concerns will result in changes to Moore’s Blueprint revamp. “We’re never opposed to taking a look at changes that might need to be made,” he said. “I don’t think that the changes that are proposed here are necessary from any sort of urgency standpoint.”

Moore’s proposal leaves untouched other parts of the Blueprint, including a gradual expansion of prekindergarten options, improving career- and college-prep for high schoolers and raising teacher pay.

Republicans think Moore’s changes don’t go far enough.

All told, Moore’s changes would result in net savings of $1.62 billion over four years. That falls “woefully short” compared to the long-term structural deficit that would balloon into the billions of dollars that the Blueprint would contribute to, said Sen. Stephen Hershey, the Republican minority leader in the Senate.

“Unless the governor takes bold action, stands up to the teachers’ union and makes dramatic cuts to the Blueprint, then we’ll be facing this same budget crisis every year,” said Hershey, who represents the Eastern Shore. “The entire Blueprint needs to be reevaluated.”

Sen. Jason Gallion, a Republican who sits on one of the committees reviewing the governor’s bill, said he’d like to consider scaling back an planned expansion of prekindergarten under the Blueprint. More cuts may be needed, Gallion said, given uncertainty over how much money the state will end up having in its budget.

“We can’t just keep kicking this can down the road,” he said.

Ensuring equity

Alvin Thornton, an educator who was the namesake of a 2000s school funding plan, spoke out against the proposed Blueprint rollbacks at a recent rally outside the State House. Maryland finds itself at an important moment when public education is being attacked, he said.

“It’s an opportunity for more Maryland to stand in the breach because of what it has already done in public education,” Thornton said in an interview.

Thornton said it’s crucial that the Blueprint funding remain in place as written.

“If you weaken the foundation amount, which guarantees the money that every child gets, weaken that, OK, then you begin to separate our children into haves and have nots,” Thornton said.

The Blueprint ensures equitable funding for students regardless of background, he explained.

“They come to us from high-poverty areas. They come to us with limited English proficiency, they come to us with disabilities, and it says that we’re going to make them equal. That’s very revolutionary, right?” he said.

That seems to be the point that Moore made five years ago.

The members of the state commission that came up with the Blueprint did so with a “data-driven, creative and equitable vision,” Moore said at the time.

“I’m here to ask you, as the leaders of our state, to lead on all aspects of the commission,” Moore said then. “Both the policy recommendations, but also that we place an equity lens on the funding.”

Baltimore Banner reporter Brenda Wintrode contributed to this story.