St. Mary's school board fine-tunes its budget

St. Mary’s public schools’ Superintendent Scott Smith said the fiscal 2025 budget “is the most challenging budget I’ve ever seen put together.”

And at a board of education meeting on May 22, Smith and school board members helped to finalize that budget. Following the county commissioners’ budget work sessions and public hearing, modifications were needed on the local school system’s operating and capital budgets.

The board of education approved a modified budget, which will now be sent back to the county commissioners for review and approval.

Assistant Superintendent of Fiscal Services and Human Resources Tammy McCourt said that state funding for the next school year showed St. Mary’s as receiving $144.1 million — or just $31,000 from the previous school year — of the $7.8 billion state total being funded to support the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, the state’s education reform plan.

McCourt said amounts can differ “pretty substantially” from Allegany County (increase of 21%) to Calvert County (decrease of 20%). Allotments were based on student enrollments and county wealth as perceived by the state.

Per pupil revenues of $17,056 place St. Mary’s County as the fourth lowest in the state, which McCourt said requires the board to “stretch every dollar.”

She said the school board received “significant support from our county commissioners” when the they added $7 million to the school board’s budget, thanks to an increase in income tax.

“The amount of work and acrobatics that are required to meet the reporting requirements and things like these is just dizzying, and it’s very easy to confuse somebody quite quickly as far as where the money is, who has what, how much it is,” Smith said. “What you need to recognize is that here in St. Mary’s County we’re going to spend the time to put it all together. We are educators at heart.”

The school system plans to use $6.5 million of its fund balance, which will be distributed primarily to other post-employment benefits and English secondary textbook adoption ($2 million each), bus driver retention initiatives ($1.2 million) and HVAC control systems ($1 million).

“This [fund balance] is coming from our utility savings we’ve been able to recognize this year as well as from frozen positions,” McCourt said.

The budget includes cutting 54.3 equivalent full-time positions, down from an estimated 100 earlier in budget planning. Many of these reductions are due to the exhaustion of federal emergency funding from the pandemic.

McCourt noted that all five pillars of the Blueprint are being supported by the budget, but the Blueprint does not cover 10 categories including safety and security, class size, arts, athletics, technology and transportation. She said that “our county commissioners continue to provide funding support for us.”

“There are moments with then county commissioners where we disagree about money resources and things,” Smith said. “But what makes St. Mary’s County public schools special — when you go see a child performing on stage, or a manageable class size, when you see state-level athletics where we’re winning state championships — is that the county commissioners fund us over flat funding.”

Kibler says, ‘Later’Student school board member Lillian Kibler of Leonardtown High School gave her last school update before stepping down from her one-year appointment.

“Lilly came with the strong belief that it’s important that students are connected, accountable, resilient and excited to learn,” Cathy Allen said, referring to Kibler’s CARE program. “As Lilly has shared the highlights of her visits during board meetings she’s offered another way for the community to understand what is truly going on in our schools.”

Kibler, who graduated from Leonardtown High with a GPA of 4.77 and will attend Yale University, thanked the school board members and said she was unable to “express how much of an honor it was to hold this position. It’s been impossibly enlightening and highly rewarding. Thank you all so much.”

Leonardtown High’s Hannah Heisler is the next student member of the board of education. She will officially take over on July 1.