Reply to Taylor's Operating Budget releases 12/17 at 6:30 pm

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Taylor wants an increase.  Where is this money going?  How about transparency![/quote]

Have you even bothered to look at the details? Almost all
of the increase simply goes to pay and benefits.[/quote]

That's just part of the money, what about the rest of the money.  MCPS has a huge budget and it should be in this kind of mess.[/quote]

It's 80% of the increase.

Yes, the detailed budget breakdown is important, and presumably they'll release more information publicly as they've done in previous years, but this is a strange thing to get hung up on right now. The idea of a small increase nominally for costs beyond salaries should not be surprising or immediately viewed with suspicion. Inflation drives costs up each year- flat spending is really a cut.[/quote]

They need to manage the money better.  Most of us aren't getting pay raises and many are out of work, which impacts the county revenue and they are tone-deaf not to realize how many families are struggling right now.[/quote]

Tightening the belt, so to speak, during economic downturns might be acceptable if it wasn't also done during economic booms. We've had 15 years of slow cuts to schools because old people never want to see their taxes go up to help kids.[/quote]

NO!

FY 2023, the budget was about $2.92 billion. This rose to $3.165 billion in FY 2024.  For FY 2025, the budget increased again to roughly $3.32 billion. The proposed MCPS operating budget for FY 2026 is approximately $3.6 billion, with declining enrollment.

[/quote]

Are you familiar with the concept of inflation?

Also, the real problem is that this is part of a long-trend. People have complained about MCPS going downhill for the last 20 years, willfully ignorant of the fact that they've been cutting MCPS funding over that period.[/quote]

THEY HAVE NOT BEEN CUTTING FUNDING.  And, if they were transpaent, you could see the waste, cut that out and they would have plenty.  MCPS is one of the highest funded schools systems.  There is no excuse for the mismanagement.  They don't need more money, they need competent leadership who puts students and staff first over their self interests.

Many of us have faced job loss, reduction in salaries with new jobs, etc.  That's life.  And, yet we manage to make it work.[/quote]
Yes, they have. Per pupil funding has fallen over the last 15 years. The extent is even worse than a naive analysis of inflation would suggest because labor costs have gone up significantly faster than general inflation (society-wide, not just MCPS). Other sectors can offset those increased costs with productivity improvements tied to technology, but that doesn't apply to education. Computers and automation don't mean we can hire fewer teachers.

Last year's budget started to change that, but now we're faced with a backlog of problems from 15 years of underfunding.[/quote]

I'm not saying what you said is not true, but the poster you replied to also has a valid stand point. MCPS didn't pass the P-card audit. A random sampling of 25 transactions out of a 1.2 million transactions in a year yield a $1 million unclear spending (e.g., over $50K payment to Bowie State University that didn't get pre-approval from BOE), so you could easily scale it up and imagine how much money has been spent in a way that doesn't add a penny to MCPS teacher's salary or student's benefit. [/quote]

You can. And cutting waste, fraud and, and abuse is important, too. But we shouldn't cut off our nose to spite our face. The immediate complaints here regarding the proposed budget are ridiculous when you can see the vast majority of the increased funding is going to staff costs, which we should all understand are going up.

Also, keep in mind something isn't waste, fraud, and abuse simply because you don't like it. Whether you're talking about government programs, corporations, or households, not everyone is always going to agree on where money should be directed. In any sufficiently large organization with a large number of stakeholders, there will always be people who don't agree with individual expenses. And there will even always be things where a majority of stakeholders don't like an individual expense. We need to spend money judiciously, but service to that objective, we also shouldn't fail to see the forest for the trees. Similarly, proper administrative procedures are important for oversight and accountability, and failure to follow those procedures doesn't necessarily make the spending wasteful.

These are both important issues: 1) addressing the current and long-term resource needs for students, and 2) appropriately managing spending. But don't lose sight of the fact that 2) is ultimately in service to the main goal in 1).[/quote]

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