County's Board of Education Adopts $1.6 Billion Budget

The Board of Education adopted a $1.6 billion budget Thursday that, pending approval from the county council and Maryland legislature, would impact all tiers of the Prince George’s County school system next year.

The fiscal 2012 budget, which has undergone several revisions since first proposed by Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. in December, now reflects a two percent decrease over the current fiscal year and factors in some $155 million in cuts.

Lagging tax revenues, exhausted federal-stimulus dollars and fewer pupils inside the county's classrooms contributed to the shortfall, which officials warn may swell between now and the budget’s final approval later this year.

Prior to the budget adoption, Hite and his staff introduced an early-retirement incentive program aimed at staving off outright layoffs for the 1,000-or-so employees who are eligible to retire. The voluntary program would provide lump sums of $15,000 to those eligible to retire.

“Instead of having to layoff an employee making, let’s say, $50,000, we incentivize somebody to retire making a $100,000 – and that gap between the two salaries would pay for the leave payout and the incentive,” said Matthew Stanski, Hite’s chief financial officer.

In addition to a three-day furlough of executive staff, as well as not funding step increases, staff differentials, stipends and cost-of-living adjustments, the budget would also impact the following areas: 

---JROTC programs will remain at each of the county high schools, but include laying off 24 full-time positions (FTEs).

---Access to evening high school will remain at the and Crossland sites, but with reduced staffing and an increase in tuition fees for students.

---Camp Schmidt will be closed, saving an estimate $1 million.

---Reading Recovery will lose 78 FTEs, some of whom may keep their jobs depending on how each school’s principal allocates their Title 1 funds.

---Specialty transportation will also go away, unless some form of fee-based system materializes between now and May. This cut alone will save about $6.5 million.

---Middle school athletics would discontinue under the budget, although school officials suggest they may still find a workaround. 

---Half of the school system’s media specialists will be eliminated, creating a situation in which the remaining 90 holdouts will split their time between different schools; however, each high school will maintain one .

---Through workforce reductions, student-to-teacher ratios will widen, on average, by about one or two students at most grade levels. At the high school level, this means an average ratio of 28:1, while kindergartners and 3rd graders will see no change in ratio over last year, at 22:1 and 27:1, respectively.

Despite these cuts, all but one of the board’s nine members voted in favor of the budget, which will now go to county’s county executive and council for further consideration and approval. On this point, several board members explained their vote as only the beginning in a long process full of opportunities to further reconcile the budget in the coming months.

Peggy Higgins (Dist. 2), who remained quiet prior to the vote, set that tone first, calling the budget a “living document” and thus still amendable to change.

Henry Armwood Jr. (Dist. 7) struck the same chord. “This must not be the final budget,” he said, adding that the period between now and May would provide a clearer picture of how state- and federal-funding levels will pan out.

A tearful Donna Hathaway Beck (Dist. 9) lamented the need to allow “phase II” of the budget process to kick in. “I have never been so anguished,” she said, referring to those early retirees who may be lured out of the school district. “It’s dismantling our system,” she wept, yet ultimately voted in favor of the budget.

Edward Burroughs III (Dist. 8) was the lone dissenter. He said he simply could not vote for a budget that contained so many “up-in-the-air” items, including the fate of specialty-schools transportation funding and Reading Recovery, a program aimed at first graders struggling to read.

According to Stanski, the $1.6 billion budget would tug 37 percent of its funding from the county, 51 percent from the state and 11 percent from the federal government. Instructional salaries make up about 34 percent of the budget. .

Of the $85 million in cuts that directly correspond to the state’s reduced funding, instructional salaries will absorb about 58 percent of the cuts, while administration and mid-level administration will absorb about 14 percent.