Schools warned of tough budget ahead

Legislators at breakfast say days of funding hikes are over in St. Mary's

Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2009

State legislators told St. Mary's school officials to be prepared to tighten their budget belt even more as a state deficit looms over next fiscal year.

The state budget deficit is projected to be $2 billion. "I don't believe that," Del. John F. Wood (D-St. Mary's, Charles) said. "I think it's going to be more."

Still, St. Mary's County is in better shape than most other Maryland counties, he said. That was about the only optimistic message that came out of a breakfast Monday between the Southern Maryland state delegation and St. Mary's school board.

The school board needs to keep looking at all aspects of its budget and "pull back," Wood said.

"A lot of this, I think, is going to be passed on to the counties, and that really concerns me," Wood said.

"Everything is going to be on the table," said Del. John Bohanan (D-St. Mary's).

He said that as much as he and other legislators want to continue to shield education from the recession, so many other aspects of government have already taken hits that next year it is likely education would see little or no increase in state funding.

"We now have the equivalent of your school system less than we had in 2007" in terms of state employees, he said. "We have a much smaller government." The state in the last two years shed 3,310 jobs; St. Mary's public schools employs about 3,300 people, counting full- and part-time teachers, support staff and administrators as well as bus contractors.

Still, Bohanan said the state's investment in education has paid off and he hopes not to actually cut funding, although he warned it would be a much lower increase than enjoyed in previous years. "We want all of this, someone is going to have to pay for it," he said.

Sen. Roy Dyson (D-St. Mary's, Calvert, Charles) said each year about this time various constituents begin showing up at his office in Great Mills to ask for increased funding.

"It started a month earlier this year and they're not asking for anything, they're just asking ‘don't cut us,'" Dyson said. This is the first time he has seen this in more than 30 years of elected service, he said.

"It's going to affect everything we do, at least in my opinion, for the next three to four years," Dyson said.

Del. Anthony J. O'Donnell (R-Calvert, St. Mary's) said that a projected 3.4 percent increase in revenue to the state next year is "overly optimistic" and that it will continue to be difficult not to cut into education funding, which makes up about $5 billion of the state's $13 billion general operating.

"You know our state employees did not have pay raises and many took furloughs," Dyson told the school board. The board last year negotiated a pay raise of 1.8 percent for all school employees, but went without step increases, which would have been about a 3 percent raise for the eligible two-thirds of employees.

He said some legislators, including Sen. President Mike Miller (D-Calvert, Prince George's), are still pushing to shift some of the cost of teacher pensions onto county governments. The latest ideas include making counties responsible for new hires' pensions.

Dyson said the state senate president and other leaders in state government have vowed not to raise taxes this year. "So without tax increases, there's only going to be cuts," Dyson said.

"We're onboard with you. We understand the situation," school board member Mary Washington said.

The morning discussion took a brief turn away from budget woes when legislators brought up several other topics of concern.

Dyson asked whether the school system was reporting names of schools that had high pockets of H1N1 flu infections.

Martirano said yes, they were reporting that information through the county health department. "We've have been very aggressive in getting the information out," he said.

Ultimately, closing a school because of a high number of H1N1 cases rests on the state superintendent and state health officer.

The pandemic flu has peaked, health officials said, but a second peak could come later this winter.

"Our goal first and foremost is to keep our schools open," Martirano said.

Park Hall Elementary School is the only local school so far to have a high infection rate, although it was not high enough to warrant closing the building, he said.

O'Donnell said that he heard from a member of the NAACP about its concerns over the low graduation rate and high dropout rate at Great Mills High School.

This led to a conversation about raising the age a child can legally drop out of school from 16 to 18, a notion brought up in legislative proposals the last several years.

Neither the state school superintendents nor the state school boards support such a measure.

"We're in favor of attacking the issue, not making an arbitrary change to the number," said school board Vice Chair Cathy Allen, who is also the president of the Maryland Association of Boards of Education.

jyeatman@somdnews.com