After months of uncertainty, Maryland legislators left the state’s landmark education law largely intact, mostly gutting Gov. Wes Moore’s bill to cut school spending by $1.6 billion over four years.
The outcome put some education advocates at ease, reassuring them that school system budgets — already stretched by inflation — won’t take as big a hit as they’d feared. Funding for students living in poverty, special education students and students learning English won’t be significantly reduced, as Moore had proposed.
“I think there was a collective sigh of relief,” said Mary Pat Fannon, executive director of the state superintendent’s association. “We have never had to work so hard to keep the status quo.”
The Democratic governor had proposed rewriting portions of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, the multi-billion-dollar plan to make the state’s schools the best in the nation, in an attempt to keep education costs under control in the coming years. However, in the final day of the legislative session, lawmakers in the Senate and House struck a compromise that preserved the money promised to schools next year. That buys advocates more time to get the rest of the money restored in future years.
The Blueprint had promised gradual but significant increases in the basic amount of money schools receive for each student they educate, rising from slightly more than $9,000 to about $12,000 over a decade. Lawmakers allowed that amount to rise as planned next budget year, but changed the plan so it would increase only by inflation for the following two years, essentially pausing the promised increases. In 2029, the basic per-student amount would increase by $334.
Click here to read the rest of the article written by Liz Bowie over at The Baltimore Banner
