The Governor’s legislative plan includes an adjustment to an element of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, “collaborative time” – non-classroom time for teachers. Citing current teacher shortages and the likely difficulty in hiring the thousands of new teachers needed to effect the desired outcome, the plan would defer this requirement of the Blueprint. Here, Conduit Street digs in and explains what that would translate to in state and local funding for this year and beyond.

The Governor, as he laid out at the MACo Winter Conference, proposes some adjustments to the multi-year Blueprint for Maryland’s Future – renewing his commitment to the plan’s outcomes, but recognizing the realities on the ground. The legislation introduced this week, HB 504 and the identical SB 429, would make multiple adjustments to the plan affecting the coming year and beyond. The element that has gathered the most attention in the early session is an adjustment to “collaborative time” – a goal to expand the non-classroom time for professional educators to spend on skill development, curriculum planning, and other functions.

Here, we look inside the bill to see how this translates to funding from the State, and from the counties – each of whom are asked to contribute much more education funding as the Blueprint plan unfolds over its decade-long roll-out.

What’s the argument for additional “collaborative time” for teachers?

The Kirwan Commission took an exhaustive look at successes from public education, and developed its plan for a Maryland path forward. Among the elements they identified as part of advancing teaching as a “prestige profession,” was to expand the non-classroom time available for teachers to improve their skills and complement their in-classroom time with additional curriculum development and the like. From the Commission’s 2019 interim report (the deepest with its policy justifications) is this tidy summary of the case:

Change the way schools are organized and managed to increase the amount of time available for teachers to tutor students who need intensive help and work together in teams and train teachers in the effective use of the additional collaborative time:

…

Teachers’ instructional time is reduced to provide additional time for collaboration beginning in 2021. Classroom teachers’ instructional time is
reduced by 25% (from 80% to 60% instructional time of the contract day) excluding certain teaching positions, including those without regular
classroom responsibilities.

Does adding non-classroom time necessarily require hiring more teachers?

Undoubtedly.

The only practical way to ensure coverage in the classroom while enabling double the “non-classroom” time for teachers is… hiring more teachers. The Governor has referenced needing 15,000 additional teachers, a number buttressed by the Commission’s own findings. So, in addition to setting higher wages for teachers through a State-mandated minimum salary (part of the phased-in plan as well), the plan calls for hiring many additional educators to accomplish the “collaborative time” goals.

The Commission’s estimate was that this cost would total $1,150 per student – estimated in 2020 dollars. This represented more than half of the anticipated increase in the proposed change in the state’s “foundation” funding per pupil required for all school systems (in the final report from the Commission).

But our more targeted educational programs depend on teachers, too – does their funding adjust also?

Yes.

A centerpiece of the funding structure envisioned under the Blueprint is that certain categories of students require additional educational resources to effectively teach, and that necessitates targeted funding to those students and services. So, programs like Compensatory Education, English Language Learners, and Concentration of Poverty are all calculated as a multiple of the foundation funding per-pupil amount. For example, for the current year, FY 2025, each English learner in a system’s enrollment triggers an additional 102% of the foundation amount (which this year is $8,789 per student) as a funding obligation split between the State and the county.

So, for most of these programs, which are themselves teacher-centered, the slowdown in teacher collaborative time and the adjustment in the foundation funding amount carries through to their funding as well — even if the text of those sections of current law may not appear in, or be amended by, the bill text of HB 504.

But special education is different, and not affected?

Correct. Maryland law reflects that students with special needs often require additional support, and that is reflected in its own component of the State funding formulas.

But unlike the other areas, special education funding is “held harmless” and is essentially de-coupled from the foundation formula by HB 504. In essence, rather than setting the foundation amount and stating special education per-student funding as a percentage of that value, the bill rewrites today’s resulting dollar amounts into the law, unchanged.

And we’re in a teacher shortage already, right?

Yes, Maryland is having trouble filling teacher positions. News for many parts of the state underscore this. So, while Maryland currently has roughly 6,000 teachers already in positions with only a conditional certification, and has voluminous unfilled teaching positions – the prospects of bringing aboard thousands more qualified teachers (even with continued increases in salary) seem challenging.

So, as the Governor indicated at the MACo conference – he calls for a delay (not an elimination) of this element of the plan, nominally to allow Maryland to catch up with its current target workforce.

So, the formulas come down?

To a small degree, at least this year. FY 26 as the first year of a multi-year phase-in of the full collaborative time element in the plan calls for $163 in per-pupil funding. That eventually ramps up to $1,527 by the end of the phase-in, in FY 33. So, HB 504 implements the Governor’s call for a four-year delay — and the initiative’s $163 price tag won’t take effect until FY 30, and won’t complete its phase-in until FY 37, rather than the current FY 33.

For the year ahead, that’s less than a 2% drop in the foundation amount – from $9,226 to $9,063. And then that reduced number flows through the other targeted formulas (other than special education) for comparable drops there.

Is this part of the State’s General Fund solution?

No, not right away. But yes, eventually.

The State has a well-stocked Education Trust Fund, established and then buttressed by voter-supported constitutional amendments, that support costs of new education initiatives – like the Blueprint. So, these incremental additional educational costs are supported by that fund. If the slowdown in collaborative time passes, it eases pressure on that fund, not the State general fund, for FY 26 – the budget year being assembled this session, facing major immediate hardship.

However, the State has a fiscal problem beyond this year, with structural problems projected to linger if not solved fully this year, and then again once the balance in the Education Trust Fund no longer supports the full costs of the Blueprint program. Current forecasts tally the problem in out-years in the range of $6 billion per year, based on current projections.

After a few years, the balance in the Education Trust Fund will no longer be sufficient to cover all Blueprint-added State costs, and the program will be supported largely by the State’s general fund – subject to an annual balance requirement. So, any funding relief (or funding increase) by this or another proposal eventually translates to the State general fund, even though in the short term that’s not yet the case.

So… does this turn into some relief on the county funding obligation?

Well, it depends.

For this year’s budget, it’s at most a small change – as shown above. And whether it has any effect on a given county depends on another question.

Dorchester County, a rural Eastern Shore community, funded their schools at $23.7 million for the current year. A small decline in their school enrollment would translate to a slightly lower “maintenance of effort” requirement under pre-Blueprint laws. However, the Blueprint’s calculation of the county “local share” of school funding programs currently is calculated at a $26.3 million requirement for FY 26 — meaning that the schools would receive, at minimum, a 10.8% funding increase. (In this fiscal climate, any agency receiving a 10% increase is noteworthy… not to mention the largest funding item in the county budget, by far)

If the provisions of HB 504 were to pass, the effects on the required funding are hard to calculate precisely, but MACo estimates the resulting requirement might drop from $26.3 to about $25.8 million. Still a substantial increase of something like 8.8% over the current year, but slightly lower than current law.

Currently, there are 10 counties that fit this general pattern — because the Blueprint’s “local share” requirement is more than the county’s old school “maintenance of effort” requirement (and the State mandates that the county fund the larger of the two), the modest drop in the foundation funding amount will flow through to some funding relief on the county government.

For the remaining 14 jurisdictions, their calculated “local share” would change just like above, but since the county’s obligation to maintain its effort and reach an even higher value, that change to the lesser “local share” has no practical effect for the coming year.

Over time, as the ambitious Blueprint funding formulas catch up to, and exceed, more counties’ local “maintenance of effort” values, that value will largely control county spending, and any State-enacted changes to the foundation amounts or similar may have carryover effect on most or all counties.

There’s more in the bill than just Collaborative Time, correct?

Definitely more. County governments are funding partners in public education, and are direct stakeholders in these funding formulas, and the mandates they place upon county governments. However, HB 504 also includes multiple other elements, that will deserve and receive ample attention during the legislative session.

MACo will take up HB 504 for a position, and that position and statement will be made public (like all MACo testimony) on the MACo website.

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More (and broader) coverage of the Governor’s education proposals, and the early session reaction are available on Maryland Matters, the Baltimore Banner, and the Baltimore Sun.