Budget Information - Updated SAE 6/3

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Who has the authority to fire Hull and Key? Felder? BOE?

Confused why people are blaming Hull for this.

The budget was in fine condition before McKnight left in February. The MVA and other programs were restored, there were no talks about RIFs or not honoring new contracts, county council was on track to approve the budget request (or at least a large portion of it) and they publicly praised Hull and the budget department for more transparency and collaboration then they had seen in years. Then Felder came in and ruined it with her ego, stupidity, and her two cronies - Key and Johnson.

MCEA is blaming him for his mismanagement of funds. He’s WASTED millions on useless contracts. I think he getting kickbacks. Makes no sense otherwise.

Speech and language pathologists are useless contracts?

MCEA is just mad that there's a trend toward providing services through non-union contractors. This is true across the country. It's a byproduct of the pay scales that unions have negotiated over the years.

Speech Language Pathologists, obviously not useless. But we need full transparency on what the contracts cover and why, since there has been such a huge increase over the last 2 years. Another post somewhere here says that contracting was used to cover the Superintendent's holiday party. As a taxpayer, unless there was some huge savings associated, I would not consider that appropriate. I work for a government entity, and our holiday parties are pot luck in a conference room.

Right. These contracts are not limited to sped and speech. Millions alone spent on terrible curriculum that teachers hate. You know how much the curriculum was before - it was free and many teachers have gone back to using that -at the secondary level-after mcps went behind their backs and renewed the contract despite teachers begging them not to. Millions WASTED.

What free curriculum are teachers going back to? Please tell us not 2.0 which was proven not to be sufficient.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teachers, I support you and share your anxiety and consternation.

Can someone explain to me how this works in a high school setting (the +1 on class size)? Our school is overcrowded and most core classes are fully subscribed. Say you have 45 students who want an AP class, and they usually only offer one section of this class. Would an increase of the class size make it less likely they would open a second section?

The class size piece here doesn't really have an effect, but the overall budget situation means they often won't have staff to support another section.

+1
I did a quick calculation for a high school with 2400 students. An increase of 1 student per class allocation means a decrease of ~ 4 full time equivalent positions, or ~20 class sections. Principals have a lot of flexibility internally about how they create sections. They have to balance student requests, staff certifications, room usage, needs of the course, and longer term stability of course offerings and teacher experience. It’s not helpful if a new elective is popular and 8 sections could be offered, if the following year there will only be 3 sections. Better to stabilize at 4 or 5 sections each year by giving seniors priority.

Right now the problem is how to decrease offerings by 20 sections and end up with 4 fewer teachers. If a department currently has an open position, the principal might decide not to fill it, and then reduce sections across multiple courses and shuffle teacher assignments. For example, 10 sections of English 10 with 25 kids each could become 9 sections at 28 kids each. Or maybe there’s an elective with 3 sections of 28. You drop it to 2 sections, shift 8 kids to a different section and make the other 20 kids pick a different elective and fill up those sections.

It’s not an easy task. Principals are going to need to make a quick decision about which positions to reduce, and then it’s going to take counseling a while to actually accomplish shifting.

Then how come Moran's letter was saying "staff member" singular instead of plural?:

All principals will report the staff member that they have identified to the Office of Human Resources and Development (OHRD) for involuntary transfer by Wednesday, June 5, at 12:00 p.m.,

• On Thursday, June 6, OHRD staffing coordinators will confirm that the staff member you identified for involuntary transfer is accurate based on position and seniority

It reads that way to me too, but if that's true it seems really unfair that small elementary schools and huge high schools both lose 1 staff member each. Anyone understand this more?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teachers, I support you and share your anxiety and consternation.

Can someone explain to me how this works in a high school setting (the +1 on class size)? Our school is overcrowded and most core classes are fully subscribed. Say you have 45 students who want an AP class, and they usually only offer one section of this class. Would an increase of the class size make it less likely they would open a second section?

The class size piece here doesn't really have an effect, but the overall budget situation means they often won't have staff to support another section.

+1
I did a quick calculation for a high school with 2400 students. An increase of 1 student per class allocation means a decrease of ~ 4 full time equivalent positions, or ~20 class sections. Principals have a lot of flexibility internally about how they create sections. They have to balance student requests, staff certifications, room usage, needs of the course, and longer term stability of course offerings and teacher experience. It’s not helpful if a new elective is popular and 8 sections could be offered, if the following year there will only be 3 sections. Better to stabilize at 4 or 5 sections each year by giving seniors priority.

Right now the problem is how to decrease offerings by 20 sections and end up with 4 fewer teachers. If a department currently has an open position, the principal might decide not to fill it, and then reduce sections across multiple courses and shuffle teacher assignments. For example, 10 sections of English 10 with 25 kids each could become 9 sections at 28 kids each. Or maybe there’s an elective with 3 sections of 28. You drop it to 2 sections, shift 8 kids to a different section and make the other 20 kids pick a different elective and fill up those sections.

It’s not an easy task. Principals are going to need to make a quick decision about which positions to reduce, and then it’s going to take counseling a while to actually accomplish shifting.

Then how come Moran's letter was saying "staff member" singular instead of plural?:

All principals will report the staff member that they have identified to the Office of Human Resources and Development (OHRD) for involuntary transfer by Wednesday, June 5, at 12:00 p.m.,

• On Thursday, June 6, OHRD staffing coordinators will confirm that the staff member you identified for involuntary transfer is accurate based on position and seniority

It reads that way to me too, but if that's true it seems really unfair that small elementary schools and huge high schools both lose 1 staff member each. Anyone understand this more?

I wouldn’t read too much into the grammar choice of the letter. I think different schools will lose different numbers of teachers; some will likely lose more than one; other may not lose any at all.

[Anonymous]

as a teacher relocating to the DC area this summer, who was hoping to find a job in MoCo, the news of this over the past week or so has been an absolute gut punch. I feel awful for all the teachers who may face the prospect of finding a new job, but selfishly speaking, it seems for outsiders hoping to be externally hired, it will be all but impossible for FY25.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is very true. I have worked for MCPS for over 25 years and the demographics have changed dramatically. Not only does it effect our schools, it trickles down to Headstart, Child Find and Infants and Toddlers. We need interpreters for meetings, papers that legally need to be translated and there is a larger number of special education services that are being needed at an early age. We have a lot of resources in Montgomery County for early intervention and people are coming to use those services.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Stop allowing criminals with “emotional disabilities” and illegal immigrant parents in our schools.

Do this and you will reclaim at least 1/3 of the budget.

Let the prisons pay for them.

It isn’t PC, but this is a fair point. There is a lot of money going towards this population and there is a limited budget. The influx of undocumented immigrants has clearly had an effect on the MCPS budget and needs to be addressed. You can’t have a legit conversation about the financial situation without discussing this aspect of it.

+1

It’s hard to have a conversation about this because it’s fraught with strong emotions on both sides. It’s a conversation we need to have.

Emotions are not why this is a hard conversation to have. It's a hard conversation to have because one side wants a unicorn and one side is aware that unicorns do not exist.

That is, one side would like to stop educating undocumented immigrants and the other side is aware that educating all children is a federal and legal mandate.

No, the unicorn is expecting MCPS schools to absorb hundreds of thousands of poor, non-English speaking students from all over the world (not just Latin America at this point) and expect good results. That simply cannot happen and our teachers and schools are clearly overwhelmed by the influx.

You can keep pretending that this has not affected our schools and that it doesn’t cost exorbitant amounts of money, but that is simply not realistic.

Our political leaders have made decisions that have led us to this situation, where our schools and neighborhoods are overwhelmed. That needs to be discussed.

I am genuinely irritated at all the expense being spent on interpreters. Why is this an entitlement? How much could be cut if we stopped doing that? If we stopped having to pay bilingual contractors to sit through IEP meetings or to attend every Infants and Toddlers visit, or to translate documents for exorbitant fees? Come here and use public resources AND don't bother to learn any English or feel any obligation to facilitate your own interaction with the system that you are taking services from? It's a bridge too far. I would never in a million years move to, say, France, and expect French taxpayers to fund English-speaking interpreters for me. What other countries do this? It really adds up.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is very true. I have worked for MCPS for over 25 years and the demographics have changed dramatically. Not only does it effect our schools, it trickles down to Headstart, Child Find and Infants and Toddlers. We need interpreters for meetings, papers that legally need to be translated and there is a larger number of special education services that are being needed at an early age. We have a lot of resources in Montgomery County for early intervention and people are coming to use those services.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Stop allowing criminals with “emotional disabilities” and illegal immigrant parents in our schools.

Do this and you will reclaim at least 1/3 of the budget.

Let the prisons pay for them.

It isn’t PC, but this is a fair point. There is a lot of money going towards this population and there is a limited budget. The influx of undocumented immigrants has clearly had an effect on the MCPS budget and needs to be addressed. You can’t have a legit conversation about the financial situation without discussing this aspect of it.

+1

It’s hard to have a conversation about this because it’s fraught with strong emotions on both sides. It’s a conversation we need to have.

Emotions are not why this is a hard conversation to have. It's a hard conversation to have because one side wants a unicorn and one side is aware that unicorns do not exist.

That is, one side would like to stop educating undocumented immigrants and the other side is aware that educating all children is a federal and legal mandate.

No, the unicorn is expecting MCPS schools to absorb hundreds of thousands of poor, non-English speaking students from all over the world (not just Latin America at this point) and expect good results. That simply cannot happen and our teachers and schools are clearly overwhelmed by the influx.

You can keep pretending that this has not affected our schools and that it doesn’t cost exorbitant amounts of money, but that is simply not realistic.

Our political leaders have made decisions that have led us to this situation, where our schools and neighborhoods are overwhelmed. That needs to be discussed.

I am genuinely irritated at all the expense being spent on interpreters. Why is this an entitlement? How much could be cut if we stopped doing that? If we stopped having to pay bilingual contractors to sit through IEP meetings or to attend every Infants and Toddlers visit, or to translate documents for exorbitant fees? Come here and use public resources AND don't bother to learn any English or feel any obligation to facilitate your own interaction with the system that you are taking services from? It's a bridge too far. I would never in a million years move to, say, France, and expect French taxpayers to fund English-speaking interpreters for me. What other countries do this? It really adds up.

What schools are paying translators for IEP meetings? My schools just use a bilingual secretary to attend these meetings during their regular work hours. They also have the phone line you can call into for translation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is very true. I have worked for MCPS for over 25 years and the demographics have changed dramatically. Not only does it effect our schools, it trickles down to Headstart, Child Find and Infants and Toddlers. We need interpreters for meetings, papers that legally need to be translated and there is a larger number of special education services that are being needed at an early age. We have a lot of resources in Montgomery County for early intervention and people are coming to use those services.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Stop allowing criminals with “emotional disabilities” and illegal immigrant parents in our schools.

Do this and you will reclaim at least 1/3 of the budget.

Let the prisons pay for them.

It isn’t PC, but this is a fair point. There is a lot of money going towards this population and there is a limited budget. The influx of undocumented immigrants has clearly had an effect on the MCPS budget and needs to be addressed. You can’t have a legit conversation about the financial situation without discussing this aspect of it.

+1

It’s hard to have a conversation about this because it’s fraught with strong emotions on both sides. It’s a conversation we need to have.

Emotions are not why this is a hard conversation to have. It's a hard conversation to have because one side wants a unicorn and one side is aware that unicorns do not exist.

That is, one side would like to stop educating undocumented immigrants and the other side is aware that educating all children is a federal and legal mandate.

No, the unicorn is expecting MCPS schools to absorb hundreds of thousands of poor, non-English speaking students from all over the world (not just Latin America at this point) and expect good results. That simply cannot happen and our teachers and schools are clearly overwhelmed by the influx.

You can keep pretending that this has not affected our schools and that it doesn’t cost exorbitant amounts of money, but that is simply not realistic.

Our political leaders have made decisions that have led us to this situation, where our schools and neighborhoods are overwhelmed. That needs to be discussed.

I am genuinely irritated at all the expense being spent on interpreters. Why is this an entitlement? How much could be cut if we stopped doing that? If we stopped having to pay bilingual contractors to sit through IEP meetings or to attend every Infants and Toddlers visit, or to translate documents for exorbitant fees? Come here and use public resources AND don't bother to learn any English or feel any obligation to facilitate your own interaction with the system that you are taking services from? It's a bridge too far. I would never in a million years move to, say, France, and expect French taxpayers to fund English-speaking interpreters for me. What other countries do this? It really adds up.

What schools are paying translators for IEP meetings? My schools just use a bilingual secretary to attend these meetings during their regular work hours. They also have the phone line you can call into for translation.

Same. We just pull a bilingual staff member.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is very true. I have worked for MCPS for over 25 years and the demographics have changed dramatically. Not only does it effect our schools, it trickles down to Headstart, Child Find and Infants and Toddlers. We need interpreters for meetings, papers that legally need to be translated and there is a larger number of special education services that are being needed at an early age. We have a lot of resources in Montgomery County for early intervention and people are coming to use those services.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Stop allowing criminals with “emotional disabilities” and illegal immigrant parents in our schools.

Do this and you will reclaim at least 1/3 of the budget.

Let the prisons pay for them.

It isn’t PC, but this is a fair point. There is a lot of money going towards this population and there is a limited budget. The influx of undocumented immigrants has clearly had an effect on the MCPS budget and needs to be addressed. You can’t have a legit conversation about the financial situation without discussing this aspect of it.

+1

It’s hard to have a conversation about this because it’s fraught with strong emotions on both sides. It’s a conversation we need to have.

Emotions are not why this is a hard conversation to have. It's a hard conversation to have because one side wants a unicorn and one side is aware that unicorns do not exist.

That is, one side would like to stop educating undocumented immigrants and the other side is aware that educating all children is a federal and legal mandate.

No, the unicorn is expecting MCPS schools to absorb hundreds of thousands of poor, non-English speaking students from all over the world (not just Latin America at this point) and expect good results. That simply cannot happen and our teachers and schools are clearly overwhelmed by the influx.

You can keep pretending that this has not affected our schools and that it doesn’t cost exorbitant amounts of money, but that is simply not realistic.

Our political leaders have made decisions that have led us to this situation, where our schools and neighborhoods are overwhelmed. That needs to be discussed.

I am genuinely irritated at all the expense being spent on interpreters. Why is this an entitlement? How much could be cut if we stopped doing that? If we stopped having to pay bilingual contractors to sit through IEP meetings or to attend every Infants and Toddlers visit, or to translate documents for exorbitant fees? Come here and use public resources AND don't bother to learn any English or feel any obligation to facilitate your own interaction with the system that you are taking services from? It's a bridge too far. I would never in a million years move to, say, France, and expect French taxpayers to fund English-speaking interpreters for me. What other countries do this? It really adds up.

It’s kind of crazy because our school is required to send out notices in multiple languages (not just Spanish) because we have parents from all over the world. We have a large population of students/families from another country (again, they don’t speak Spanish) and it can be challenge to communicate with the parents. It definitely requires more time, energy and money if we have to get a translator.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Stop allowing criminals with “emotional disabilities” and illegal immigrant parents in our schools.

Do this and you will reclaim at least 1/3 of the budget.

Let the prisons pay for them.

It isn’t PC, but this is a fair point. There is a lot of money going towards this population and there is a limited budget. The influx of undocumented immigrants has clearly had an effect on the MCPS budget and needs to be addressed. You can’t have a legit conversation about the financial situation without discussing this aspect of it.

+1

It’s hard to have a conversation about this because it’s fraught with strong emotions on both sides. It’s a conversation we need to have.

Emotions are not why this is a hard conversation to have. It's a hard conversation to have because one side wants a unicorn and one side is aware that unicorns do not exist.

That is, one side would like to stop educating undocumented immigrants and the other side is aware that educating all children is a federal and legal mandate.

No, the unicorn is expecting MCPS schools to absorb hundreds of thousands of poor, non-English speaking students from all over the world (not just Latin America at this point) and expect good results. That simply cannot happen and our teachers and schools are clearly overwhelmed by the influx.

You can keep pretending that this has not affected our schools and that it doesn’t cost exorbitant amounts of money, but that is simply not realistic.

Our political leaders have made decisions that have led us to this situation, where our schools and neighborhoods are overwhelmed. That needs to be discussed.

I’m not disagreeing with you, however, I don’t think this is an issue that can be changed at the local level. Once they are here, they are entitled to the same services as any other child. This is a federal immigration issue. Honestly we don’t even have it that bad, yet. I know other states have much bigger numbers.

True. This is definitely a federal immigration issue. But I do think Montgomery County has made it ‘easier’ to be an undocumented immigrant. Voters here have decided that we want to attract more cheap labor and so we offer even more benefits to undocumented immigrants than some other counties that might be less welcoming.

This means more undocumented immigrants end up here and more services are needed.

But again, as long as this is what voters (and business leaders) want, you are correct that the school system has to educate them. Business owners want as many undocumented immigrants as possible because it keeps their labor costs low. Taxpayers provide health insurance for undocumented immigrants, so the business owners don’t have to. Not a bad deal if you own a business.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t understand the reduction in SDT to 0.6.
What will they do for the 0.4 piece? Teach? How many classes will that be per SDT?

Two

When do the SDT folk have to commit to staying in their position and taking over two classes in a particular subject? Once they decide, are they going to bump out another teacher with lower seniority to the SDT? I assume the SDTs will want to teach in their certification areas so they will push out a junior teacher who is teaching that particular subject. How is all that going to get figured out and when?

[Anonymous]

Principals have discretion to keep SDT at a 1.0 allocation, if I am reading the Moran letter correctly. I imagine many will protect their SD! With whom they work closely on ILT.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Principals have discretion to keep SDT at a 1.0 allocation, if I am reading the Moran letter correctly. I imagine many will protect their SD! With whom they work closely on ILT.

They can keep them at 1.0 but it would be .6 SDT plus .4 classroom teacher.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Principals have discretion to keep SDT at a 1.0 allocation, if I am reading the Moran letter correctly. I imagine many will protect their SD! With whom they work closely on ILT.

SDT are truly useless for HS and MS. They help lead staff meetings (once a month) and pointless once a month PD which could easily be an email. They are godsends at the elementary level, but completely unnecessary beyond elementary.

[Anonymous]

At most secondary schools stds are .8 but are given the extra .2 as a bonus. They usually take that allocation from already understaffed esol because they always seem to have a part-time allocation principals never bother to fill. They certainly never make the sdt teach that one class. I suspect they will push that to 2 classes to keep the stds happy. It’s not right though because some others teaches have to pick up the slack.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is very true. I have worked for MCPS for over 25 years and the demographics have changed dramatically. Not only does it effect our schools, it trickles down to Headstart, Child Find and Infants and Toddlers. We need interpreters for meetings, papers that legally need to be translated and there is a larger number of special education services that are being needed at an early age. We have a lot of resources in Montgomery County for early intervention and people are coming to use those services.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Stop allowing criminals with “emotional disabilities” and illegal immigrant parents in our schools.

Do this and you will reclaim at least 1/3 of the budget.

Let the prisons pay for them.

It isn’t PC, but this is a fair point. There is a lot of money going towards this population and there is a limited budget. The influx of undocumented immigrants has clearly had an effect on the MCPS budget and needs to be addressed. You can’t have a legit conversation about the financial situation without discussing this aspect of it.

+1

It’s hard to have a conversation about this because it’s fraught with strong emotions on both sides. It’s a conversation we need to have.

Emotions are not why this is a hard conversation to have. It's a hard conversation to have because one side wants a unicorn and one side is aware that unicorns do not exist.

That is, one side would like to stop educating undocumented immigrants and the other side is aware that educating all children is a federal and legal mandate.

No, the unicorn is expecting MCPS schools to absorb hundreds of thousands of poor, non-English speaking students from all over the world (not just Latin America at this point) and expect good results. That simply cannot happen and our teachers and schools are clearly overwhelmed by the influx.

You can keep pretending that this has not affected our schools and that it doesn’t cost exorbitant amounts of money, but that is simply not realistic.

Our political leaders have made decisions that have led us to this situation, where our schools and neighborhoods are overwhelmed. That needs to be discussed.

As the parent of a current magnet middle schooler who utilized early intervention, I thank the taxpayers of Montgomery County for that resource. My child is thriving today, partially as a result of targeted support at an early age. I would never deny or begrudge that support to another child.