Reporting from The Daily Record highlights counties’ ongoing challenges to fund the Blueprint and other implementation concerns.
Maryland’s 24 counties continue to express concerns about funding and implementing the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future (“The Blueprint”), catching the attention of legislators and The Daily Record. A December 18 article from the local media outlet lays the issue out in plain terms: “Schools blueprint funding seen as top education issue before Md. legislature.” The article opens:
Helping Maryland’s counties afford their share of the Blueprint, the landmark plan to revamp the state’s public schools and early childhood programs, will be the No. 1 education issue before the General Assembly in 2024, Senate Majority Leader Nancy J. King said.
MACo’s Michael Sanderson and Brianna January spoke to The Daily Record for the article:
Michael Sanderson, executive director of the Maryland Association of Counties, or MACo, said Blueprint funding is one of the top priorities for county leaders.
‘This is on everybody’s mind,’ he said. ‘Some counties have already felt it, others will feel it this coming year or a year or two down the road. Everybody has that reckoning coming. It’s an ambitious program with really important goals but a serious price tag.’
Kent County proves a strong example of the compounding funding challenges:
In the Eastern Shore’s Kent County, Ronald Fithian, president of the Board of County Commissioners, said that to comply with the Blueprint, the county would have to increase its per-pupil annual expenditure by 65% between fiscal years 2023 and 2034.
Such an increase would require a 5-cent property tax increase every year for seven to eight years in a row, solely for education, he said.
‘We want to be team players,’ Fithian said of Kent County’s obligation to fund the Blueprint. ‘But when it gets to this point you have to say no. I hope it doesn’t come to that, honest I do.’
Of key concern is the Blueprint’s unintended consequences on other critical county services, like public safety and health. From the article:
The Blueprint law’s funding requirements force county leaders to make painful choices, Sanderson said: ‘Imagine the difficulty for counties, when they also have to focus on public safety and public health and all those other really large priorities.’
The issue of the Blueprint overtaking other county priorities was also top-of-mind at the 2023 MACo Winter Conference session, “Education Reform: The Blueprint for the Blueprint.” During that session, Prince George’s County Administrator Tara Jackson demonstrated the difficulty of raising local revenue to meet the Blueprint’s local funding requirements. She noted that several of the disparity grant counties are already at the max property tax rate for their county, and other additional taxing would put more strain on those disadvantaged families. The result, Jackson says, is that counties are unable to contribute adequate funding to other categories of county service, like public safety, housing, and the environment, that they would otherwise like to more greatly resource.
A clear example of the need for some flexibility in Blueprint implementation is pre-k expansion. From the article:
MACo’s Sanderson said the Blueprint’s pre-K provisions illustrate the problems with the overall program. In particular, he pointed to the expectation that a significant percentage of private childcare providers would become pre-K educators.
‘The Kirwan Commission believed that if we put more carrots out there, they would become fully accredited education providers,”’Sanderson said. ‘That hasn’t happened.’
The Blueprint provisions were drawn up before the pandemic, noted Brianna January, MACo’s associate policy director.
‘The context was different,’ January said. ‘We saw childcare providers closing up shop right and left.’
Three years into the Blueprint, the pre-K situation is ‘an easy illustration of why you need some nip and tuck in the program,’ Sanderson said. ‘We literally don’t have places to put the literal desks and seats that we would need to provide pre-K.’
As a first step to support counties as they work to fund the Blueprint, MACo has adopted transparency in education spending as one of its four legislative initiatives for the upcoming 2024 legislative session. The initiative reads, “Reporting and budgeting systems must ensure county decision-makers have access to these tools and information to fulfill their fiduciary duties as funding authorities and partners in school success.”
Learn about MACo’s transparency in education spending initiative.
