CAMBRIDGE — Although the Dorchester County Board of Education approved the district’s fiscal year 2025 budget on June 3, not everyone felt what was proposed was ready for approval.
On social media, county residents shared there concerns, and board member Chris Wheedleton, who could not be at the meeting due to a work conflict, said he was shocked when he found out it had been approved.
“I as a board member then should have had the opportunity to receive feedback from the community (and) talk with the community about some of the ideas that we should have around that budget so that, by the time we voted, I was equipped to have all that feedback,” he said.
One aspect of the balanced $88.5 million operating budget that drew particular concern — and has since been reversed — was the decision to remove media specialists from libraries, redistributing them to other positions in the school system and putting instructional assistants in the libraries. This would have contributed to the district saving over $313,000, or 32.3%, in salaries and wages expenditures compared to fiscal year 2024, according to board documents.
Board member Talibah Chikwendu, who voted against approving the budget, said during the meeting that she thought the board needed to look harder at the budget to find other ways to save that money.
In an interview with the Star Democrat Thursday, Chikwendu said she voted against the budget because she did not like some of the ways that the district’s financial concerns were being resolved.
“I like the fact that we got a chance to work to resolve them,” she said, later adding, “It wasn’t about media specialists as much as it was about any frontline staff.”
Chikwendu said if another category of staff had been moved around like that, “the objection would have been the same.”
At the meeting, North Dorchester High School librarian Jacqueline Bennett talked about the impact of her role in the school and asked that the district not remove media specialists from libraries.
“I understand that you have to make tough decisions, but I’ve devoted my life to this,” she said.
Board member Sheri Hubbard, who voted in favor of the budget, said she agreed that “it would be a shame” to move media specialists to other positions in the district, and clarified that approval of the budget did not mean they couldn’t amend it.
In an interview Friday, Board President Mike Diaz, who also voted to approve the budget, said Dorchester County Public Schools Interim Superintendent Jymil Thompson made a decision later in the week to not redistribute its media specialists to other positions in the school system.
On June 12, DCPS communications and community outreach specialist Valerie Goff said in an email that the district is "looking at other means to mitigate the budget shortfalls." Goff said Thompson met with district media specialists June 6 to reassure them that their positions are secure.
Leading up to the district announcing Thompson's decision, multiple took to social media expressing frustration with the decision. Some called on residents to reach out to the Board of Education.
Lucas Thorpe, who ran for Diaz’s board seat in the May primaries and lost, said in an interview that he doesn't think taking librarians out of the libraries would benefit literacy scores. He said the entire situation points to a larger issue of elected officials trying to run the school system like a business, without considering students and staff.
Thorpe brought up the district’s alternative education contract with Vision Quest, which the district is paying more than $93,000 per month for, as well as two alternative education programs with Transforming Lives for elementary and middle schools that the board approved at the June 3 meeting. He said that although alternative education is important, the public needs to draw concern to these contracts.
Diaz said in an interview that alternative education is something DCPS has used for many years. He said the Board felt Vision Quest was “best poised” to provide services to the district, and mentioned there are services built into the program like family functional therapy.
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
Although Wheedleton was aware the budget had been included on the agenda for the meeting, he said he communicated with the Finance Committee — made up of Diaz, board Vice President Susan Morgan, Thompson and DCPS Assistant Comptroller Laurie Dale — ahead of the meeting to say he didn’t think the board was ready to approve the budget.
Wheedleton told them he still needed answers to some “significant questions” related to the budget approval process so that he could support the budget moving forward.
“I asked, both verbally and in writing, when we would be having a community meeting to share both the challenges and the priorities that we were working through, when we would have a meeting where we were expected to vote and what needed to be submitted to either the state or the county,” Wheedleton said in an interview with the Star Democrat on Friday. “And I still have yet to receive answers to those questions.”
In the interview, Wheedleton spoke about the importance of receiving community feedback in the budget process. He said that, instead, the board made a decision at a meeting they knew he wouldn’t be able to attend and gave no time for community feedback on Thompson’s budget presentation.
Wheedleton said that although he is expressing his concerns publicly, he remains committed to working with the board to find “productive solutions.”
“I really do want us to learn from this and move forward in a way that we can all work together to make the best possible decisions for the schools and our students,” he said.
At the meeting, Diaz said unlike previous years where it would take about two months of work to get the budget to the finish line, the fiscal year 2025 budget process started in January.
“I can’t tell you how many meetings we did and the hours that we committed to really getting into this thing to make it what it is right now,” Diaz said at the meeting. “Nobody’s ever going to be perfect, and I think there’s probably still some more work to do ongoing as we move through this thing.”
In an interview with the Star Democrat Friday, Diaz said there are some things the board will agree on and others that it won’t. He said it’s inevitable that there are times when board members can’t attend a meeting.
'FISCAL CLIFF'
The balanced $88.5 million operating budget is a $7.4 million increase from fiscal year 2024.
State revenue sources total $59.9 million, an increase of $4.6 million from fiscal year 2024. County revenue sources total $23.7 million, a decrease of $265,200 from fiscal year 2024. The remaining revenue comes from fund balance carryover from prior years and other funding sources, like investment income and building use income.
Compared to the fiscal year 2024 budget, fixed charges expenditures increased 22%, from $17.8 million. Pupil services had the second largest increase between fiscal year 2024 and 2025 budgets, increasing 7.8%, from $2.7 million to $6.8 million.
In his budget presentation at the June 3 meeting, Thompson talked about the “fiscal cliff” that is coming with COVID-19-related Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding and Maryland Leads grant funding coming to an end.
Diaz said the district is trying to dial it back when it comes to spending. In January, the board asked for an audit trail so it could look at every financial transaction the district makes.
“We had an overspending problem,” Diaz said. “And to get the house back in order, we’ve got to do certain things to right that ship. And it’s painful sometimes. And they’re hard decisions to make.”
Board members also talked about costs that are out of the district’s control. Diaz mentioned inflation and Morgan, who voted to approve the budget, brought up a requirement of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future that the district will need to increase teacher starting salaries to $60,000 by 2026.
“That’s not an easy thing to do,” she said. “And that’s causing a lot of money to be poured into personnel.”
Thompson warned that it’s possible more cuts will need to be made down the road.
“We really have to look at our financial situation,” he said, later adding, “Our financial situation hasn’t improved, and we’ve made a lot of poor decisions that have gotten us into this situation that we’re in currently.”
This story has been updated to include the district's response.
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