Montgomery County Councilmembers sat down for more than two hours Tuesday for a work session with public school officials, striving to understand how the school budget is prepared and what drives up costs.
“The goal here is for us to work together to address these issues. Your budget challenges are our budget challenges. Our budget challenges are your budget challenges,” said Council President Andrew Friedson.
Before “crunch time” when the budget needs to be passed, it is important that councilmembers understand how MCPS spends its money, said Council Vice President Kate Stewart.
During preparation of the current MCPS budget, Board of Education members urged the council to greatly increase its allocations, noting that extra federal funds received during the pandemic ended.
Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) make up about one half of the county budget. The current FY 2025 operating budget is $3.3 billion. 65% of the funds to operate the school district come from Montgomery County, 28% come from the state and 3% comes from the federal government.
The MCPS budget grew by 45.9% from Fiscal Year 2015 to Fiscal Year 2025, or about 4% per year.
Personnel costs are the largest part of the school budget with MCPS filling its teacher staffing vacancies with older, more experienced teachers who receive a higher salary than beginning teachers. Students whose first language is not English, and problems related to the pandemic have caused MCPS to hire more personnel.
Personnel costs for full time employees was $95,716 in Fiscal Year 2015, $105,297 in Fiscal Year 2020 and $121,008 this year.
Other increasing budget lines include insurance and pension costs.
Total expenditures per student grew from $14,780 in Fiscal Year 2015 to $20,561 in Fiscal Year 2025.
“Our current path is not sustainable,” said Superintendent Dr. Thomas Taylor. That is why his staff intends to create future budgets at “base zero” and work from there, he said. First to be included in the budget are mandatory costs, followed by what MCPS should do and then “what we would like to do,” he explained.
When Councilmember Gabe Albornoz asked what affect the President Donald Trump’s election and threats to end the Department of Education would have, Taylor replied that schools with the highest poverty level could lose Title 1 funding.
Also, he said, if federal jobs are drastically cut, “that would really affect students.”
MCPS expects to receive $112 million from the federal government, including $56 million for Title 1 this school year.
Tuesday’s meeting was the first of three scheduled on the school budget.
