By Adam Pagnucco.
Public school funding is a hot topic and we have certainly written a lot about it. Last spring, the county council voted to raise property taxes by 4.7% and cited the needs of MCPS in doing so. (It turns out that lots of other agencies and departments got big increases too.) That said, public schools account for a huge share of public funding not just in MoCo but pretty much all over this region and beyond. This series compares MoCo’s school funding to its peers over the last several years.
First, a word of caution. Any comparison of budgets between counties or school systems runs a serious risk of generating apples and oranges issues. That’s because budget presentations can differ significantly between jurisdictions. What counts as being in a school budget? And what counts as a local contribution to schools? There are lots of ways to answer those questions.
For the purpose of standardization, this series compares MoCo’s school budget to the seven other largest school districts in Maryland: Baltimore City and Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Frederick, Harford, Howard and Prince George’s counties. We are not including D.C. or Northern Virginia jurisdictions because their budget presentations are different enough to warrant caution. We are also comparing school operating budgets (not capital budgets), county appropriations to operating budgets (the money that county governments actually control) and enrollment growth. We then compare one-year changes (FY23 to FY24) as well as changes from FY17 to FY24. Why do we pick FY17 as a base year? Because that’s as far back as Frederick County Public Schools publishes budget numbers.
Let’s start with some descriptive numbers. The chart below shows the total operating budget by school district in FY24.
Some of these districts have a lot more money than others. Why is that? You guessed the main reason: they differ in enrollments as shown in the chart below.
We will get into more details in Part Two.