By Adam Pagnucco.
The Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 500 have issued a press release blasting measures taken by the county council’s Education and Culture Committee that may trim County Executive Marc Elrich’s ten percent property tax increase.
As I reported yesterday, council staff recommended two reductions to Elrich’s recommended budget for MCPS totaling $80 million. Those reductions would come from the school system’s fund balance ($25 million) and offsetting increases in state aid ($55 million). The Education and Culture Committee met yesterday to consider those recommendations.
The committee did not address the staff’s plan directly, but what they did may have implications for the tax hike. The tool the council uses to change an executive’s recommended budget is the reconciliation list, which is a ledger of proposed spending increases and proposed reductions by line item. This year, the list includes all executive recommendations for changes to last year’s budget plus all proposed changes by the council, making it extremely complicated. (We shall see how this changed process works!) The Education and Culture Committee made three recommendations.
1. They recommended trimming the executive’s budget request for MCPS by $22.3 million. That’s close to the fund balance recommendation made by staff and equivalent to one penny of the executive’s ten cent property tax increase.
2. They recommended adding 7 tranches totaling $156 million for MCPS to the recommendation list as “high priority” items. This is equivalent to 7 pennies on the property tax.
3. They recommended adding 2 tranches totaling $45 million as “priority” items. This is equivalent to 2 pennies on the property tax.
So what they are saying is that MCPS will likely receive a very large funding increase but not all the way to the executive’s recommendation.
Council Member Will Jawando, chair of the Education and Culture Committee, explained this in a tweet yesterday.
The view of the two largest school unions (MCEA and SEIU Local 500) is that this is tantamount to a cut of 3 cents to Elrich’s 10 cent tax hike. We shall see if it is because the full council will decide the property tax rate in a separate vote. But this is the position of 3 of 11 council members, including 2 of the most progressive members (Jawando and Kristin Mink), and indicates what has been long believed: that the council may not be prepared to adopt Elrich’s full tax hike.
MCEA and SEIU Local 500 believe that anything less than the full ten cent tax hike will endanger their collective bargaining agreements with MCPS. MCEA has an agreement and SEIU is still in bargaining. They have issued a statement condemning the Education and Culture Committee’s vote which is reprinted below.
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For Immediate Release
Contact: Dalbin Osorio, mceapress@mceanea.org
Historic 2-year tentative agreement on wages for teachers and ongoing negotiations with support personnel will be severely impacted unless County Council passes reasonable 10-cent property tax increase
Rockville, MD – After months of fighting to combat critical staffing shortages in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) won one of the most significant wage increases in their union’s history last week. Furthermore, negotiations between SEIU Local 500 and MCPS continued with positive momentum. But these victories will be short-lived unless the Montgomery County Council approves a revenue enhancement measure later this month. Yesterday, in a critical vote, the County Council’s Education & Culture (E&C) Committee did not recommend that County Executive Marc Elrich’s proposed 10-cent property revenue enhancement measure be adopted. Instead, despite decrying the consistent sexism that the education profession faces, they recommended a seven-cent floor on the revenue enhancement measure that will:
- Force MCPS to make cuts on vital resources, such as parent resource rooms, mental health supports, and athletic coaches.
- Undoubtedly halt the positive momentum in negotiations with SEIU Local 500
- bring MCPS back to the negotiating table with MCEA to negotiate a new wage agreement.
The tentative agreement (TA) MCEA and MCPS agreed to last week, if ratified, would mean that salaries for teachers in the next school year will increase by $5,602 for 10-month employees and $6,583 for 12 month employees. The TA also included funding for well-deserved step increases for those eligible. This recommendation by the E&C Committee made right before Teacher Appreciation Week is a new low for our elected officials.
Pia Morrison, President of SEIU Local 500, stated that “as the Montgomery County Council continues to deliberate the appropriate funding for MCPS and potential property tax rates – I implore them to pass a budget that will consider revenue enhancement measures that will provide the adequate resources to support students’ academic and social-emotional needs and the staff that support them. Yesterday, the Education and Culture Committee listened to passionate statements from teachers, administrators, and support personnel about how short staffed the school system is. Now is the time to solve this problem.”
The 10-cent revenue enhancement measure was proposed to exclusively cover the cost of increases in the school’s budget. This is a necessary first step in reclaiming vital public education funds. If the recommended seven-cent tax increase is approved by a majority of the Council on May 17th, Montgomery County will continue to severely lag behind multiple counties in the state for per-pupil spending.
The revenue enhancement measure is needed for our educators, students, and communities now:
- To correct an ongoing imbalance in per-student spending. Adjusted for inflation, per-student spending has gone down more than $3,000 in comparison to 2010.
- Because in regard to per-student spending, Montgomery County is fifth among the largest school systems in the state.
- Because Montgomery County currently has the lowest commercial property tax rate and second lowest residential property tax rate in the National Capital region.
- To invest in MCPS educators, who currently earn between 15% and 17% less in real dollars than they did in 2002. Also, teachers today earn 20% to 25% less than those in professions that require similar levels of education and expertise.
Given this latest insult from our elected officials, a coalition of teachers, administrators, education professionals, staff and community leaders have launched a campaign to fight for the revenue enhancement measure. This necessary step is meant to combat the corporate real estate lobbyists and big businesses who are fighting against a reasonable, affordable, and necessary revenue enhancement.
The “United for our Kids, Our Communities and Our Future” campaign includes a website and a petition that currently has more than 8,000 signatures from county residents. The coalition plans to raise community awareness with the website and petition, and in paid ads on various digital platforms to support a real investment in the essential workers of our communities.
“The community understands the need to fully fund our public schools. They know and experience what the years of disinvestment has done to our classrooms and our communities,” said Jennifer Martin, MCEA President. “This revenue enhancement measure is necessary to attract, support, and retain highly effective teachers and other front-line education workers. We know that the greatest difference –outside the home– in driving student achievement is having an excellent teacher in every classroom.”
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MCEA represents more than 14,000 classroom teachers, school counselors, speech pathologists, media specialists and other educators in the Montgomery County Public Schools system; MCEA is one of the largest local affiliates of the National Education Association (NEA) and is a leader in building a new kind of educators’ union that responds to the needs of today’s educators and students. For more information, visit www.mceanea.org.
SEIU Local 500 represents more than 20,000 workers including paraprofessionals, bus operators, school support workers, and other school personnel in the Montgomery County Public Schools system; SEIU Local 500 is on the ground organizing new work sites, helping employees to come together and bargain collectively with their employer. For more information, visit https://www.seiu500.org/