By Adam Pagnucco.
Part One described our methodology and provided basic statistics on total operating budget and enrollment. Let’s look at recent increases in school budgets.
Regular readers will recall the huge fight this past spring over MCPS’s budget. School system leaders said they were cut but they actually received their biggest increase in at least twenty years. Here is how MCPS’s one-year total operating budget increase in FY24 compares to Maryland’s other large school systems.
MCPS leaders did not get everything they wanted but they did better than most of their peers. The only large school system that did better was Frederick, which got a 10.6% increase. It’s probably not a coincidence that Frederick County Executive Jessica Fitzwater is a former public schools teacher.
Now let’s extend our time period to FY17-FY24. We are using FY17 as our base year because that’s as far back as Frederick County Public Schools publishes budget numbers.
Now this is a different story. MCPS was number two in one-year budget change but is last in seven year change. I explained this pattern in a prior post. MCPS had great funding years in FY23 and FY24 but those were preceded by much tighter budgets in the five years prior. To an extent, Montgomery County was playing catch up in its last two school budgets.
There is another explanatory factor for these budget changes besides local generosity – enrollment change. State law sets per pupil floors for local contributions to schools. Without a waiver from the state, the general rule is that if enrollment increases, funding must increase along with it. The chart below shows change in enrollment from FY17-24.
So Frederick was a runaway leader in enrollment growth, which was a big reason why it was a leader in total operating budget growth. MCPS enrollment has been relatively flat, with pre-pandemic increases partially offset by COVID losses. But that only partially explains MoCo’s long-term lag in funding.
Another factor in the above was change in funding per pupil. We will get into that in Part Three.