Elrich and Friedson confusingly blame each other for underfunding MCPS

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Where are you seeing those details?

MCPS listed its non-recommended budget cuts in preparation for this shortfall. Some of what the PP is talking about comes from those recommendations.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:To balance the budget, the Chief Operating Officer, Brian Hull, and the Acting Superintendent, Monique Felder, say they will close the Virtual Academy, increase class size in all schools, and lay off teachers. In addition to that, MCPS has signed open contracts with 200 new teachers and intends to break those contracts.

Increased class size affects most teachers. Classroom teacher workload will be increased. Specialist allocations could be reduced. The problems experienced from the sub shortage will get worse. MCPS employees may have significant financial problems from being laid off so suddenly.

Executive leadership within MCPS must share in these cute. Eliminating redundant senior leadership positions should be prioritized before cuts impacting frontline educators.

What you're saying is accurate, but just to provide clearly context, Felder recommending increasing class sizes by +1 student.

[Anonymous]

Here's the document that was shared with the County Council's Education and Culture Committee that listed some of the non-recommended reductions that Felder put forth for MCPS in the event the fully requested budget was not funded: https://montgomerycountymd.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?view_id=169&clip_id=17381&meta_id=178364

Specifically:

Possible budget changes: The Interim Superintendent communicated possible areas where the budget could be adjusted below the level requested by the Board if needed to meet affordability levels set by the Council’s appropriation level. The letter identifies the following as possible approaches:
o Class Size: The letter estimates that an increase in class size of one student would achieve savings of $10.5 million; excluding Title I schools from this increase would result in savings of $7.3 million.
o Staff Development Teachers: The letter proposes a reduction of the current allocation of staff development teachers from a full position at every school to a 0.5 position at each school. MCPS estimates this would achieve a savings of $8.2 million; $6.1 million if Title I schools are exempted.
o Central Services: The letter indicates that additional savings would have to be taken from central services, but does not specify further details.

[Anonymous]

These two knuckleheads are the Penn and Teller of finance. Let's marvel at their bad decisions to make money disappear right before your very eyes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They need to cut the central office bloat first and foremost. After that happens we can talk about funding.

I keep reading this sentence over and over but what bloat does it refer to? List the positions that you think don't support the school system.

This one: https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/clusteradmin/equity/

I am a teacher feel these positions are a waste. Well meaning but basically useless except for spreading talking points. None of it applies down to the instructional level. At best it feels like preaching. Staff dont feel that we can challenge it though. Just endless summer PowerPoint video to watch over and over again without any teaching advice given.

And this one:
https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/otls/

Yeah, that department. Instruction specialists: I have never seen any of these people show up in a classroom.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:SOURCE: https://moco360.media/2024/05/22/elrich-friedson-butt-heads-over-mcps-funding/

Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich is criticizing the County Council for “underfunding schools,” even though his proposed fiscal year 2025 county operating budget includes less money for Montgomery County Public Schools than the council’s spending plan.

In a straw vote Thursday, the County Council preliminarily approved a $7.1 billion county operating budget for fiscal year 2025, which includes $26.3 million more for Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) than had been allocated in Elrich’s proposed spending plan.

Elrich’s $7.1 billion budget proposal represents a 4.9% increase from the current fiscal year’s budget. His proposal for the next fiscal year, which starts July 1, includes $3.3 billion for MCPS, funding 98.2% of the county school board’s request. The total school spending showed a $107 million increase over spending in the current fiscal year, but also represented about a $60 million cut in the school board’s funding request, according to board documents.

With the additional proposed money for MCPS, the council’s proposal would fund 99.2% of the school board’s budget request. The council is set to take a final vote on the budget Thursday.

“The school budget’s coming up pretty short. And it didn’t have to be,” Elrich said Tuesday in an interview with MoCo360. “I’m a little baffled about the logic behind some of this.”

In the interview, Elrich said he had always planned to use money from a tax dollar-fueled fund used to pay retirement health benefits to county employees to close the 1.8% gap between what he proposed for MCPS and what the school board requested.

“People are paying a whole lot of money into this fund for nothing,” Elrich said. “That money could have been used to meet the current needs of the school system.”

However, Elrich did not include that funding idea when he introduced his proposed budget on March 14.

Council President Andrew Friedson (D-Dist. 1) told MoCo360 Tuesday that he had never seen a written proposal to use so-called Other Post-Employee Benefit (OPEB) funding and that it was not part of the spending plan or amendments Elrich submitted to the council in March. He first heard of Elrich’s idea when asked by a MoCo360 reporter about it Tuesday.

“It’s hard to take seriously criticism about underfunding education from a county executive who recommended a budget that funded education dramatically less than what the council supported and ultimately has recommended and is poised to approve,” Friedson said.

Friedson dismissed Elrich’s idea as not serious and said the county executive has a “history of robbing the OPEB trust fund.”

“OPEB is not just an abstract conglomeration of four letters. It is the public health benefits that we are obligated from a fiscal standpoint to pay,” Friedson said. “So if the county executive is suggesting that he would fund education on the backs of the health care of educators, retirees and public servants, I think that is a really bad idea.”

When asked if he thought the public were aware of his idea for schools funding, Elrich said he was “not sure it was obvious” because the money wasn’t listed as a budget line item since it would come from an existing fund.

I have a headache reading this. Elrich seems more wrong here than Friedson and the Council. If he had a plan for funding the EBP, it was on him to communicate that to the Council and the public. The fact that he feels otherwise makes question his sanity....

It's no wonder MCPS has so much chaos and misdirection going on. Look at how the CE and Council are so clearly disconnected.

Elrich is gaslighting for his upcoming campaign.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:To balance the budget, the Chief Operating Officer, Brian Hull, and the Acting Superintendent, Monique Felder, say they will close the Virtual Academy, increase class size in all schools, and lay off teachers. In addition to that, MCPS has signed open contracts with 200 new teachers and intends to break those contracts.

Increased class size affects most teachers. Classroom teacher workload will be increased. Specialist allocations could be reduced. The problems experienced from the sub shortage will get worse. MCPS employees may have significant financial problems from being laid off so suddenly.

Executive leadership within MCPS must share in these cute. Eliminating redundant senior leadership positions should be prioritized before cuts impacting frontline educators.

Alternatively, they could cut all the bloat at the CO, stop funding studies that do nothing, hire new comms firms, and give out multimillion-dollar payouts in avoidable settlements.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They need to cut the central office bloat first and foremost. After that happens we can talk about funding.

I keep reading this sentence over and over but what bloat does it refer to? List the positions that you think don't support the school system.

Start with the 5 director positions McKnight created for her buddies.

Or special contracts with the Kid's Museum or Electric Busses or Another high paid comms firm or another study about something incredibly unuseful and unrelated to education or maybe some SEL training or the 10000 other incredibly dumb things they blow a pile of cash on every year

This and all the attorney fees spent fighting families.

The bottom line is that MCPS has sufficient funding but chooses to blow it on things that aren't helpful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:More from the article :

Elrich said he believes the council’s decision during budget deliberations in 2023 not to raise the property tax rate by 10% to help fund MCPS, as he proposed, set the school system back. The council compromised with a 4.7% rate increase, while still fully funding the school budget proposal. Friedson, who was then council vice president, did not support a property tax rate increase.

“The council created the problem last year when they told the school system to use $33 million to hire people. But that was federal money, not county money,” Elrich said. “Those costs rolled into this year’s budget, putting additional pressure on the budget, leaving aside the normal inflation and everything else the school system had to deal with.”


——-

I think Elrich is in the right totally pointing out that hiring people whose salary is to be paid by federal funds that they knew would disappear was a fiscally irresponsible choice. The county needed to have raised property taxes so they could fund these new hires after the federal funds dried up or not to have hired people they knew they could not afford to keep the following year. Everyone knew ESSR funds were ending this year so there is no excuse for not planning ahead.

The County has no power to demand that the schools come back with cuts that don't involve cutting staff. The county government does this to every other department and forces them to find savings. Stuff like training, take home vehicles, p card privileges, replacement equipment, etc. get reduced, delayed, or cut outright. It's never an optimal service delivery, but it's one that recognizes we have limited revenues that have to fund millions of things.

MCPS never has to do the same, so they don't. They whine for more money. They threaten to cut jobs. They suck at prudent fiscal management, and there's no way to fix that, other than hold maintenance of effort requirements as a ceiling and not a floor.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They need to cut the central office bloat first and foremost. After that happens we can talk about funding.

I keep reading this sentence over and over but what bloat does it refer to? List the positions that you think don't support the school system.

Didn't McKnight add like 30% more staff to the CO for various DEI committees? And why does MCPS have 2X more admin positions than FCPS?

Idiot. MCPS does not have 2x mor admin positions than FCPS. FCPS has more.
You right wingers keep repeating that same lie.

The data was posted here a month or two ago and MCPS has close to double the admin positions of FCPS.

As has been explained over and over and over, this is down to a difference in how FCPS and MCPS categorize employees. MCPS categorizes certain school-based positions as "Central Office employees" because they are paid from the Central Office, whereas those exact same roles are categorized as school-based in FCPS and come out of the school budget.

But when it comes to true Central Office positions like curriculum directors, assistant superintendents, etc. they are the same.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They need to cut the central office bloat first and foremost. After that happens we can talk about funding.

I keep reading this sentence over and over but what bloat does it refer to? List the positions that you think don't support the school system.

Didn't McKnight add like 30% more staff to the CO for various DEI committees? And why does MCPS have 2X more admin positions than FCPS?

Idiot. MCPS does not have 2x mor admin positions than FCPS. FCPS has more.
You right wingers keep repeating that same lie.

The data was posted here a month or two ago and MCPS has close to double the admin positions of FCPS.

As has been explained over and over and over, this is down to a difference in how FCPS and MCPS categorize employees. MCPS categorizes certain school-based positions as "Central Office employees" because they are paid from the Central Office, whereas those exact same roles are categorized as school-based in FCPS and come out of the school budget.

But when it comes to true Central Office positions like curriculum directors, assistant superintendents, etc. they are the same.

Seems like a dishonet way to disguise all the bloat at MCPS. Most of those jobs are various equity initiatives designed to close the achievement gap from the top down.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They need to cut the central office bloat first and foremost. After that happens we can talk about funding.

I keep reading this sentence over and over but what bloat does it refer to? List the positions that you think don't support the school system.

Didn't McKnight add like 30% more staff to the CO for various DEI committees? And why does MCPS have 2X more admin positions than FCPS?

Idiot. MCPS does not have 2x mor admin positions than FCPS. FCPS has more.
You right wingers keep repeating that same lie.

The data was posted here a month or two ago and MCPS has close to double the admin positions of FCPS.

As has been explained over and over and over, this is down to a difference in how FCPS and MCPS categorize employees. MCPS categorizes certain school-based positions as "Central Office employees" because they are paid from the Central Office, whereas those exact same roles are categorized as school-based in FCPS and come out of the school budget.

But when it comes to true Central Office positions like curriculum directors, assistant superintendents, etc. they are the same.

Seems like a dishonet way to disguise all the bloat at MCPS. Most of those jobs are various equity initiatives designed to close the achievement gap from the top down.

We are literally talking about speech pathologists and building services people here. Those are the folks categorized as "Central Office" in MCPS but "school-based" in FCPS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They need to cut the central office bloat first and foremost. After that happens we can talk about funding.

I keep reading this sentence over and over but what bloat does it refer to? List the positions that you think don't support the school system.

Start with the 5 director positions McKnight created for her buddies.

Or special contracts with the Kid's Museum or Electric Busses or Another high paid comms firm or another study about something incredibly unuseful and unrelated to education or maybe some SEL training or the 10000 other incredibly dumb things they blow a pile of cash on every year

This and all the attorney fees spent fighting families.

From a financial standpoint, those costs make sense. If a child's needs can be served within MCPS, then it's absolutely worth it to spend $50K to fight the private placement, rather than $80K per year for the rest of that child's educational journey.

You may think that's wrong or unkind or immoral, but it's a good use of taxpayer resources.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They need to cut the central office bloat first and foremost. After that happens we can talk about funding.

I keep reading this sentence over and over but what bloat does it refer to? List the positions that you think don't support the school system.

Start with the 5 director positions McKnight created for her buddies.

Or special contracts with the Kid's Museum or Electric Busses or Another high paid comms firm or another study about something incredibly unuseful and unrelated to education or maybe some SEL training or the 10000 other incredibly dumb things they blow a pile of cash on every year

This and all the attorney fees spent fighting families.

From a financial standpoint, those costs make sense. If a child's needs can be served within MCPS, then it's absolutely worth it to spend $50K to fight the private placement, rather than $80K per year for the rest of that child's educational journey.

You may think that's wrong or unkind or immoral, but it's a good use of taxpayer resources.

This x 1000%. It’s ECON101. Unpopular opinion to have. But spending money to save more money.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They need to cut the central office bloat first and foremost. After that happens we can talk about funding.

I keep reading this sentence over and over but what bloat does it refer to? List the positions that you think don't support the school system.

Didn't McKnight add like 30% more staff to the CO for various DEI committees? And why does MCPS have 2X more admin positions than FCPS?

Idiot. MCPS does not have 2x mor admin positions than FCPS. FCPS has more.
You right wingers keep repeating that same lie.

The data was posted here a month or two ago and MCPS has close to double the admin positions of FCPS.

As has been explained over and over and over, this is down to a difference in how FCPS and MCPS categorize employees. MCPS categorizes certain school-based positions as "Central Office employees" because they are paid from the Central Office, whereas those exact same roles are categorized as school-based in FCPS and come out of the school budget.

But when it comes to true Central Office positions like curriculum directors, assistant superintendents, etc. they are the same.

Seems like a dishonet way to disguise all the bloat at MCPS. Most of those jobs are various equity initiatives designed to close the achievement gap from the top down.

We are literally talking about speech pathologists and building services people here. Those are the folks categorized as "Central Office" in MCPS but "school-based" in FCPS.

Yeah. I'm a special ed para. I've seen central office once in the last 5 years, but my pay is coded as from central.