The school reforms mandated by the multibillion-dollar Blueprint for Maryland’s Future are proving extraordinarily expensive. It is now becoming clear that their costs are more than just financial.
In a report Carroll County Public Schools filed in May with the state’s unelected accountability board, the school district acknowledged its plan for implementing the Blueprint is currently misaligned — the school system is spending more than is required in some areas and not enough in others.
For example, according to The Carroll County Times, “the system will exceed the Blueprint-required special education spending minimum by $14.6 million, and the system tops the current state-required special education spending minimum by $25 million in fiscal 2024.” Adherence with the Blueprint’s standards will require a massive reallocation of financial resources on the part of CCPS in order to meet spending minimums in other areas.
Further, while CCPS currently employs the approximate number of teachers it needs system-wide, many of those teachers find themselves in the wrong place under the Blueprint.
The Times reports, CCPS “would have to move around 470 full-time equivalent of teachers to schools with higher concentrations of poverty to fulfill the Blueprint’s mandate without a budgetary increase.”
It was just a matter of time before the Blueprint forced CCPS to move large numbers of its teachers.
Democrats were very deliberate in how they rolled out the Blueprint. The goodies came first. Higher teacher salaries. “Free” community college classes. Prekindergarten classes for 3-year-olds.
Only after teachers and the public became accustomed to receiving these goodies would they be presented with the bill.
But now it seems even Democrats are balking at the cost and oppressive nature of the Blueprint’s mandates. Maryland Governor Wes Moore has said there will have to be “difficult discussions” about the Blueprint, effectively acknowledging it was a purely partisan initiative from the beginning, passed by progressives who totally ignored the objections of lawmakers who represent millions of Marylanders living in large swaths of the state.
Moore needs local elected officials to raise county taxes to help pay for the Blueprint’s enormous unfunded mandates.
He seems to understand that in order for the Blueprint to have any chance of achieving the impact progressives have promised, it must have the buy-in of local boards of education and the citizens they represent.
However, I suspect his real concern is that without Republican support for the Blueprint, when the state and counties inevitably do raise taxes, he and Democrats alone will feel the full brunt of the taxpayers’ wrath.
As long as the Blueprint remains a purely progressive initiative, Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves when the billions of dollars they are spending on the plan fail to meet expectations.
Perhaps the most immediate reason for Moore’s new-found willingness to make changes to the Blueprint is he is hearing from teachers and their union representatives who are upset that so many educators will be forced to transfer to new schools if something is not done.
So, Moore is adopting a “let’s work together” approach, hoping to make necessary “adjustments” to the Blueprint. It’s a shame his party did not have that attitude when it passed the legislation with no Republican support, overriding the veto of former Governor Larry Hogan.
Moore sees political danger ahead for himself and his party, and he is doing what he can to head it off.
Still, the governor’s admission that the Blueprint is flawed and needs to change is a welcome development.
Progressive lawmakers in Annapolis have made it plain they really don’t care what the citizens of Maryland’s conservative counties think about anything, so it would be understandable if state Republicans decided to just let the governor and his party twist in the wind. Democrats own this very expensive boondoggle. It’s all theirs. When it blows up in their face, they will only be reaping what they sowed.
But if the governor genuinely wants to work this out in a way that benefits Maryland’s children regardless of where they live, he and Democratic lawmakers must abandon the Blueprint’s one-size-fits-all approach and acknowledge that all children are not the same. Nor are the schools they attend, or the counties in which they live.
Whatever changes are made to the Blueprint must be flexible enough to allow local boards of education to develop their own plans for meeting the needs of the children they serve rather than being tethered to a plan that may be appropriate for some counties but wholly inappropriate for others.
State Democrats have gotten themselves into a pickle and they now need Republicans to help them avoid the looming fiscal disaster they created.
Carroll’s elected officials, and the officials of likeminded Maryland counties, need to leverage their new-found influence, not only to exact necessary changes to the Blueprint but also to ensure the voices of the people they represent are no longer ignored.
To that end, Carroll’s lawmakers need to make sure nixing the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project, the proposed 70-mile 500,000-volt transmission line, is an important component of that discussion.
Chris Roemer resides in Finksburg. He can be contacted at chrisroemer1960@gmail.com.
