Reply to Thomas taylor youtube "staff" video 5/12

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[quote=Anonymous]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjNVTHd1QWo

Hello, team MCPS. This is your superintendent, Thomas Taylor, and I'm sorry to interrupt your day, but I have an important message to share with you.

And I apologize in advance. This is going to be a longer than usual message.

Sharing information with you has not been a strength of ours in the past. And to be honest, this is a real pain point for us because it's a delicate balance.

How much to share? How much is too much?

Is it relevant? This is certainly an area for us to improve on. Regardless, I think you deserve leadership that believes being a good teammate means sharing information with you, not just in times of celebration, but also times of distress.

Unfortunately, today, the news isn't great. So, here goes. You may have either seen on TV or read about the budget shortfall that the county is experiencing. And that's what I want to discuss with you today.

And before you turn this off or tune out, I want to impress upon you how important this is.

You're going to want to hear this all the way to the end. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Our financial situation is bad.

And to be completely fair, our county council has a lot of difficult choices to make. Their job isn't easy. But this is what they were elected to do.

MCPS is the single largest part of the county's operating budget. It's about 48% of the county's operating budget. And yes, that should be higher to better align with other communities, but that's a different conversation for a different day.

There's no way for us to be completely insulated from the type of financial adjustment that's coming. And it's a downward adjustment.

At the onset of this budget process, we knew that this was going to be a difficult budget year. There are significant economic pressures to consider. You are personally experiencing many of them and consequently there is also a large revenue shortfall to match our dire state.

That said, the county council also knew about our employee contracts that were negotiated two years ago in good faith. They asked us for multi-year contracts so that they could plan better and we held up that end of the agreement and we made our agreements in good faith.

This is an important point to elevate for you because it has become a major sticking point in this budget process and one that I'm not really interested in revisiting unless absolutely necessary.

Every year the cost of doing business and the cost of living naturally increases. The cost of gas goes up. The cost of electricity goes up. The cost of construction goes up. And the cost of our workforce naturally goes up. An increase each year is to be expected.

Every year is the largest budget in history.

This shouldn't be a surprise. Inflation plays a key role in each year's increase and so does the cost of new expectations without new revenues.

So any reduction, even a reduction to planned increases, is really a reduction to our ability to function. It is the same as asking us to do more with less.

And that's precisely what's happening. And when our budget is comprised of 90% of only two things, how many people we employ and how much we pay them, there are really only a couple of choices we have to balance the budget.

And to balance the county's budget shortfall of 150 million, our entire planned increase of 179 million is on the table for consideration.

80% of which is made up of, you guessed it, compensation and benefits from our negotiated agreements.

None of this is a secret. Right now, County Council is considering a reduction to the school systems budget request in 10% increments or tranches of our increase that's been planned.

Basically, the county council will decide how much to cut the school system's budget request by those 10% buckets or tranches, and they roughly equate to 17.9 million per tranche in those increments.

At the request of county council, I have sent them a detailed list of what I will likely recommend to the board of education by way of these tranches to balance whatever shortfall they leave us with.

None of these are good options and all of these options reduce critical staff and services to children and their families.

Each reduction presents unique and difficult challenges for us to solve after the fact. It is important for you to know that proposed reductions in any area are not a reflection of the individuals who work very hard in those areas.

Every one of our teammates is critically important and does important work.

The likely proposed reduction plan is however designed to keep any potential reductions as far away from the classroom as humanly possible. And in many cases, you will see that that isn't even possible.

If these reductions come to fruition, it will touch every aspect of our school district operations and services to kids and their families.

Make no mistake, this will have a significant impact on the service that we are able to provide to our community.

And yes, this is a pretty scary inflection point, not just for MCPS, but also our community as a whole.

Because I think it's important to be transparent and so that you have a clear understanding of what's really going on here, an email message has been sent to some of our teammates to let them know that their position or job classification might be listed and considered for a potential reduction.

These messages are also by no means final or comprehensive as to where we will ultimately land at the end of this process. There may be more to come.

The county council will finalize its planned reductions of our budget this week and we will have a clearer picture of what's what by week's end.

After the county council votes on the total county budget on May 21st, I will recommend a final budget reconciliation to our board of education for action by June 4th. That is a really tight timeline.

This year has had a lot that we can celebrate and that's been thanks to you and your hard work and I really wish that we weren't closing the school year with this cloud hanging over our heads.

In short, I wish this news was better, but I believe that it is important for you to know all of this because several of our colleagues or perhaps you yourself have received one of these messages.

This is painful and will require all of us to stand tall and with empathy as we navigate the next several weeks.

Even though I know you won't feel like it, we will continue to share information with you as we have it. This is an evolving situation.

Thank you for your continued service to the students and families of Montgomery County.[/quote]

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