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The Charles board of education has had to make some tough calls to address a $17 million shortfall in funding from the county.
On April 22, the school board held a work session where the school system’s chief financial officer, Karen Acton, laid out various cuts and reductions to the budget.
The school board had proposed a $523.4 million budget for next fiscal year, an increase more than $42 million over the current year.
The school system’s request for fiscal 2025 included $248.4 million from county government. The commissioners countered with funding $231.4 million.
The county proposed funding for the school system was still a $12.6 million increase from the current year’s county allotment.
School finance staff said increases to mandatory costs, such as health care, bus contracts, costs related to the Maryland Association of Boards of Education, contracts for nurses and collective bargaining assumptions, now come in at around $22.3 million.
However, the increases for collective bargaining assumptions went down nearly $2 million in the April 22 revision of the budget.
Blueprint implementation lost $350,000 of the budget, which would have gone toward establishing an early college liaison and providing start-up costs for an early learning center in Waldorf. The start-up funds for the early center were instead made a one-time cost of $250,000, along with TV production equipment for $362,216.
An additional $312,000 was added to staffing needs to create a principal, secretary and building service manager for the new Margaret Jamieson Thornton Elementary School.
Extended learning took major reductions in the revised budget, losing a total of $3.4 million towards supplies, wages, and transportation.
The system was forced to postpone a litany of initiatives, cutting back on approximately $11 million.
Among the postponed initiatives was $120,000 for gun detection licensing, $900,000 for replacement laptops and desktops, $50,000 for equipment going to people and children with special needs and $250,000 for various AP program textbooks.
Various new positions will also have to be postponed, including English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) teachers, which was slated for $324,000.
On April 23, the board of education held a town hall on the budget to let citizens express their concerns with it or to answer any questions they may have had on it.
Early on at the town hall, Maria Navarro, the school system’s superintendent, said, “We are going to be 40 to 41 percent of the county slice of the local budget. We really wanted to gain some ground on that. We wanted to be higher in the mid-40s.”
Navarro and Acton said with the $17 million shortfall predicted from the county, about 4% of the budget was unfunded.
Addressing a concern from a citizen who said that the school system could use money that it has in reserve, Acton advised against budgeting on the system’s fund balance.
Fund balance is generally used for one-time purchases, and continuously budgeting on it would mean that balance would be eventually depleted. This would also mean that the school system would have no purchasing power in the case of an emergency. It would require the board to go to the county for emergency funding if needed, Acton said.
“It is not fiscally prudent to let that balance get too low,” Acton said.
School board member Jamila Smith asked Acton if a situation were to arise where a school’s boiler went out and the school system did not have to money to fix it, how long would the school be closed?
Acton said, “It could certainly be closed for quite a while.”
Pascale Small, a candidate for an at-large seat on the board of education, asked if the board had a number or percentage for how much of the budget is going to literacy.
While there was no figure for how much of the budget is going to literacy specifically, Navarro said that the system would run the numbers and that currently, 64% of the budget goes to overall instruction.
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