SNOW HILL – The Worcester County Commissioners voted 4-2 this week to fund the school system at the maintenance of effort level in the coming fiscal year.
The majority of the commissioners this week voted to provide Worcester County Public Schools with funding of $100,006,640 for the coming fiscal year. The amount is less than what the school system requested but meets the maintenance of effort requirement (MOE), which states that local governments must maintain their education funding from year to year on a per-student basis.
“I don’t feel good about this at all but it’s time to do something,” Commissioner Jim Bunting said.
The Worcester County Board of Education’s proposed budget for the coming fiscal year included a $106 million county appropriation. The request was about 4%, or $4.1 million, higher than the current year’s budget. School system officials said the bulk of the increase was tied to salary increases proposed for staff.
In recent weeks, the commissioners have made various requests for more information from the school system, which, unlike the county’s other departments, provides not a line-by-line budget but a summary.
During a budget work session Tuesday, Commissioner Chip Bertino asked if the school system had provided the additional information county staff had requested in recent weeks. When staff said just some of the information had been provided, Bunting said he thought the budget should be funded at the MOE level.
Commissioner Joe Mitrecic objected and said educating the county’s youth was probably the most important thing the county did.
“We certainly don’t want to incarcerate them later on,” he said. “I’m sure the sheriff doesn’t want to be chasing them around Worcester County when we end up with a bunch of uneducated youth at their wits end.”
He said going with an MOE budget was the wrong message to send to educators.
“There’s got to be some sort of meeting point,” he said. “I just can’t support this. Our youth are the future of this county.”
Commissioner Eric Fiori said the county had asked repeatedly for transparency, as it did with all departments.
“Many of our departments have reduced their ask and sharpened their pencils and done everything they can,” he said, adding that the school system hadn’t even made an attempt to reduce the proposed education budget.
He stressed that the MOE funding wasn’t an attack on education but rather an effort to ensure budget numbers were reviewed closely.
“What we’re looking to do is get a handle on the spending,” he said.
Commissioner Diana Purnell said teachers were already not being paid enough.
“Yes, we need transparency, yes we need to see what’s going on,” she said. “We ask for that in every department. The board of education has not been like they should have but I tell you what, the ones that are going to suffer is not anyone in our department necessarily but our kids are going to suffer. Right now teachers are walking away from school systems throughout this nation. They’re going to walk away from Worcester County as well.”
For years, the school system was able to attract teachers partially because of its proximity to the beach, according to Purnell.
“You can’t sell sand anymore because when they come into this community they’re going to have to make enough money to pay rent,” she said. “Rents are outrageous. We don’t have housing right now.”
She said funding the school system at the MOE level was harming the community as a whole. She said kids already weren’t getting the mental health support they needed.
“They’re going to walk out of Stephen Decatur one day with a diploma in their hand and it’s not going to be worth one damn thing,” she said. “They’re not going to be able to function.”
Commissioner Caryn Abbott said the county had given the school system months to provide the requested information. In response to Purnell’s assertion that teachers were leaving their jobs, Abbott said it was because of safety concerns, not pay.
Fiori said he agreed with Purnell as far as education being the utmost priority.
“That is why we’re pushing the way we’re pushing,” he said, adding that there was non-education related spending within the school system budget. “We want to get this money to our educators. That’s why we want to see the transparency.”
Bunting said the county was impacted by the state’s wealth formula, which resulted in the state providing about 20% of the education budget, leaving the remaining 80% to be funded by local government.
“Right next door in Wicomico County it’s the exact opposite,” he said.
He said he didn’t know what the solution to that was but felt the state should help pay for some of the unfunded mandates it was putting in place.
Abbott returned to the issue of transparency.
“At the end of the day the taxpayers fund our schools and they deserve transparency,” she said. “That’s all we’ve been asking for and we haven’t gotten it.”
Mitrecic responded that the board of education wasn’t a county department but rather a department run by an elected board.
“What they do with the money once we fund it, that’s up to them,” he said.
Mitrecic said that state officials would tell the school system to raise its tax rate if it needed more money for education.
“We have one of the lowest tax rates in the state,” he said, adding that the county was fortunate to have a large number of non-resident property owners that contributed to the county’s tax base.
“Fund it the way you want to fund it but in all honesty we don’t really have a purview over the board of education,” he said, adding that it was similar to the sheriff’s office and the state’s attorney’s office in that regard.
Bertino said those agencies were also headed by elected officials but provided more detailed budgets than the board of education.
He said the county had funded the school system beyond the maintenance of effort level for many years.
“When maintenance of effort became a state mandate, because of the generosity of our predecessors, that threshold was made much higher,” he said. “As a result, we’ve been paying considerably more moving forward.”
He said many county employees would feel their departments’ budgets were sacrificed so the school system could be funded.
Bertino said the requests this year for more budget details were to understand where taxpayer money was going, not to micromanage school system spending. He added that this was not an attack on education.
“We are asking for transparency,” he said. “We are asking to see where the dollars are going.”
The commissioners voted 4-2, with Purnell and Mitrecic opposed and Commissioner Ted Elder absent, to approve a maintenance of effort budget for the school system. Staff noted that the county’s proposed budget also includes funding for the school system’s OPEB (other post-employment benefits) liability.
“It costs somewhere between $6-7 million a year for existing retirees at the board of education,” said Weston Young, the county’s chief administrative officer. “They have $2.8 million in their budget. The county fully funds the remainder of that.”
He said that while that was the annual retirement expense, the county also put money toward the school system’s long-term OPEB liability, which amounts to more than $140 million.
