Senate Rejects Governor’s Harmful Education Cuts, but Comprehensive Reform Is Still Needed

The Senate’s education budget improves significantly on Gov. Hogan’s budget proposal. Adopting a proposal from the Budget and Taxation Committee, the chamber restored more than 70 percent of the cuts to public schools in the governor’s budget and set aside additional money for Maryland schools’ unmet needs. At the same time, both plans leave in place a flawed school funding system under which too many children can’t access the supports they need to learn and thrive. The Senate deserves credit for rejecting the governor’s harmful cuts, but we still need to make comprehensive reforms to ensure every child in Maryland gets a world class education.

The amended budget restores $13.25 million of the $19.25 million in cuts Gov. Hogan proposed in January:

• The Senate fully restored $5 million in funding for extended day and summer academic programming. Under a bill introduced by the state’s Innovation and Excellence in Education Commission (Kirwan Commission), this funding will be reserved for schools in which nearly all students are from low-income families.
• The Senate restored $3.8 million for programs to help the state recruit and retain high-quality teachers, out of $9 million cut by the governor. These investments are sorely needed at a time when all 24 of Maryland’s local school systems face a teacher shortage.
• The Senate restored 94 percent of funding for the Next Generation Scholars program, which received no funding in the governor’s budget. This program supports efforts by nonprofit organizations to increase college attendance among low-income high school students.
• The Senate fully restored $250,000 for robotics education.

The Senate also set aside funding to meet some of the state’s unmet educational needs:

• $10 million reserved for school safety grants to ensure that children can learn in an environment free from gun violence and other threats to their safety.
• $6.9 million reserved to fund the Kirwan Commission’s 2018 “down payment” bill. This funding will help address some of the challenges the commission identified while the body finalizes its full recommendations.
• $200 million reserved for implementation of the final Kirwan Commission recommendations, which are expected later this year.

While the changes significantly improve on the governor’s budget, these improvements do not change that fact that Maryland will continue to underinvest in public schools in fiscal year 2019. The last time the Department of Legislative Services compared our state’s actual education funding to the standard set by the 2002 Bridge to Excellence in Public Schools Act, the analysis found that we miss that standard by about $1 billion each year—without adjusting for the cost of today’s higher academic expectations. This underinvestment continues to this day, and is most acute in school districts that serve large shares of students of color. This disparity underscores the need to fundamentally reshape our school finance system and guarantee children across Maryland the support they need to succeed.