{"id":7715,"date":"2017-03-14T07:00:15","date_gmt":"2017-03-14T11:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=7715"},"modified":"2017-03-13T11:33:33","modified_gmt":"2017-03-13T15:33:33","slug":"hell-no","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=7715","title":{"rendered":"Hell No!"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco.<\/em><\/p>\n

A state commission charged with examining changes to Maryland\u2019s public school funding formulas is sifting through recommendations for improvement.\u00a0 And in the early deliberations, one big loser stands out:<\/p>\n

Montgomery County.<\/p>\n

The State of Maryland is a major player in public schools funding.\u00a0 In FY17<\/a>, the state will send $5.5 billion in operating aid to local school districts, about a third of its general fund budget.\u00a0 MCPS gets 28% of its operating budget from the state<\/a>.\u00a0 Prince George\u2019s County Public Schools gets 57% of its budget from the state<\/a>.\u00a0 In total, state aid accounts for 48% of Maryland public school budgets<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The state\u2019s generous K-12 spending is driven by formulas dating back to 2002, when a state commission led by Howard University professor Alvin Thornton (commonly known as \u201cthe Thornton Commission\u201d) proposed massive new investments in education.\u00a0 These investments have helped rank Maryland\u2019s public schools among the nation\u2019s best.\u00a0 Now another state commission<\/a> chaired by former University of Maryland System Chancellor William E. Kirwan<\/a> is reexamining the state\u2019s funding formulas to see if they can be improved.\u00a0 And here is where things are starting to go badly wrong for MoCo.<\/p>\n

A consultant paid by the Maryland State Department of Education recently completed a two-year study<\/a> on the state\u2019s funding formulas.\u00a0 In the interest of promoting \u201cadequacy\u201d in public school spending for students across the state, the consultant made several recommendations for changing the funding formulas which are now being examined by the Kirwan Commission<\/a>.\u00a0 One of them is that Montgomery County should get a 63% cut in state aid (a reduction of $354 million) while local taxpayers should pay 60% more (an increase of $842 million) towards MCPS.\u00a0 Montgomery County Council Member Craig Rice, a member of the commission, said \u201cthat would be devastating\u201d<\/a> and termed the suggested local dollar increase for MCPS \u201cimpossible.\u201d\u00a0 Indeed, the County Council just levied a 9% increase in property taxes in part to increase funding for MCPS.\u00a0 The consultant\u2019s recommendations don\u2019t just apply to MoCo: they would phase out all state aid for schools in Kent, Talbot and Worcester Counties while sending massive increases to St. Mary\u2019s, Harford, Charles, Calvert and Prince George\u2019s.<\/p>\n

MoCo is already short-changed on state aid because of wealth formulas<\/a> that disadvantage the county because of its high property values and high incomes but don\u2019t recognize its high cost of living.\u00a0 The result is that MoCo taxpayers get back just 24 cents for every dollar in taxes they pay to the state<\/a>.\u00a0 The state average for all residents is 42 cents.\u00a0 Howard County, which has a higher average household income than MoCo, gets 30 cents.\u00a0 Only Talbot and Worcester Counties get back proportionately less than MoCo.\u00a0 If anything resembling the consultant\u2019s report winds up being recommended by the Kirwan Commission and passed into state law, this imbalance will get a lot worse.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Your author has been told that the report is merely a \u201cconversation starter\u201d and thus is irrelevant.\u00a0 But we are reminded of the last conversation the state had about public school funding.\u00a0 For decades, the state covered the cost of teacher pensions as part of its commitment to K-12 education.\u00a0 The program was particularly valuable to MoCo, which has higher teacher compensation costs than other jurisdictions because of its high cost of living.\u00a0 A decade ago, state leaders began to have \u201cconversations\u201d about having the counties pay these costs despite the fact that Boards of Education, not county governments, set teacher compensation packages.\u00a0 A spokesperson for the Speaker of the House said it was \u201ca philosophical argument that we definitely need to have.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 In 2010, almost all MoCo state legislators promised to oppose a shift in their election campaigns.\u00a0 But just two years later, Governor Martin O\u2019Malley proposed a partial pension funding shift, backed by both the Speaker and the Senate President, and most MoCo lawmakers voted to support it.\u00a0 The cost of the shift to the Montgomery County Government increased steadily from $27 million in FY 2013 to $59 million this year<\/a>, with $6 million offset by the state<\/a>.\u00a0 This far exceeds the cost to any other local government and is more than a third of the amount collected by the county\u2019s recent 9% property tax hike<\/a>.\u00a0 The county government now pays more for teacher pensions than it does for libraries, recreation, courts, IT, housing or environmental protection<\/a>.\u00a0 Its teacher pension payments easily swamp any money earned from the liquor monopoly, which will return $21 million to the general fund this year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So goes these conversations.\u00a0 Now that this new conversation has started, here is a suggested response from all of our state legislators and county leaders to this consultant\u2019s report.<\/p>\n

HELL NO.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco. A state commission charged with examining changes to Maryland\u2019s public school funding formulas is sifting through recommendations for improvement.\u00a0 And in the early deliberations, one big loser stands out: Montgomery County. The State of Maryland is a major player in public schools funding.\u00a0 In FY17, the state will send $5.5 billion in … Continue reading Hell No!<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[151,32,211,210],"tags":[1545,1475,1890,1915],"class_list":["post-7715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adam-pagnucco","category-mcps","category-state-aid","category-teacher-pensions","tag-adam-pagnucco","tag-mcps","tag-state-aid","tag-teacher-pensions"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4mKJE-20r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7715"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7718,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7715\/revisions\/7718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}