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During my eight years in the Maryland House of Delegates, I opposed a number of bills that attempted to regulate the local school systems. As I now focus intently on HCPSS, I am seeing, first-hand, the unhappy impact many of those bills are having on our school system.
A year ago, like many of us, I was skeptical as to why HCPSS budgets needed constant increases over general inflation when student enrollment was flat. Over the last year, I have learned the primary reason for these needed increases is that every year, more UNFUNDED MANDATES impose new requirements that must be funded. Each year, the school system must reorganize its processes, curriculum, and staffing to include more and different obligations. Here are just a few of the changes that will affect the budget.
$ Mandated decrease in teacher teaching time. The Blueprint requires that teachers on the career ladder only teach 60% of the day, using 40% of their time working with students individually and collaborating with other teachers. Currently, teachers teach seven classes; implementing this requirement would decrease those teachers’ teaching time to just four classes per day.
$ Mandated, full-day preschool. The Blueprint requires the local school systems to provide full-day preschool for 3- and 4-year olds, with a staged implementation plan. While the state provides some funding for operating this mandate, not so much for the capital side of the issue. Where will jurisdictions such as Howard County, find space to house this new batch of young students when it doesn't have enough space to house its current student population even with over 240 relocatables.
$ Failure of federal government to abide by its commitment to fund 40% of the Special Education mandated under the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act)
The importance of providing education to every student and the success of so many disabled students heretofore not given the opportunity to obtain an education, is obvious. Unfortunately, on several accounts, the number of students with disabilities has continued to grow, and the unique and varied services needed to provide an adequate education to every student has created costs not previously part of a school system’s budget. Neither the federal nor the state government has stepped up its share of the increased costs. For instance, the state provides a flat rate of $1,000 per special education student for transportation. Yet the actual cost per student for this transportation for HCPSS in FY2024 was $7,400.
$ Transportation. The State allocation for general education transportation is based on an old formula for annual increases that are woefully out of tune with reality. For FY2025, HCPSS will receive $24.3 million from state sources; the cost to HCPSS is $64.1 million – and Howard County still underspends all other large counties in per-pupil spending.
$$ State Mandated: Transporting Special Education Students to non-public MANSEF schools all across the state. In order to provide the best educational opportunity for special education students, HCPSS has maximized its use of the state-supported nonpublic MANSEF schools, with the number of students referred to these schools growing to 322 with many more still on a waiting list. Although the state pays the tuition for these schools, HCPSS must pay to transport each student to these schools -- which are located across the state, and few of which are in Howard County.
$$ Federal Mandate: Transporting homeless youths “to and from their school of origin.” This means that a student who is temporarily sheltered in Howard County must be transported to the school he or she last attended when they were permanently housed, even when in another school district or another County. In addition, HCPSS must provide transportation for these students that allows for full participation in school activities such as extracurriculars. Currently, there are 624 such youths with that number growing particularly as the COVID-era rental agreements end.
$ State Mandate to supply all schools with feminine hygiene products. While very few females would disagree with the goal of this mandate, the rules are sent by state mandate, without meaningful funding. In 2023, HCPSS spent $102,818 for the dispensers and supplies—with supplies costing more and requiring annual resupplying. As small as this amount may seem in a multi-million-dollar budget, HCPSS has no flexibility to. Modify the program when it finds out, for example, that “products are used for other purposes than intended in student bathrooms.”
$ Mandated Staff Positions. There is legislation that restricts school ability to manage budgets by mandating specific staff positions.
$ Mandates to create ongoing programs through one-time grant funding. One example is the Maryland Leads grant that allowed 25 HCPSS students to participate in the Apprenticeship Maryland Academy as paid teacher and health room assistants. When the grant ended post-COVID, HCPSS can afford to fund only 11 students to take advantage of this program.
Although some of these costs may seem trivial, they all add up – and these are only a small number of “extra” expenses that are over and above the traditional expenses budgeted for a school system 20-30 years ago, when many parents were in school. Moreover, as the legislature encroaches more and more into directing and mandating educational requirements, local school boards such as Howard County lose more and more control of their budgets and are forced into a one-size-fits all mold that costs more, and, in Howard County, undermines years of successfully educating our students.
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