By Adam Pagnucco.
On Friday, Superintendent Thomas Taylor sent a message to MCPS employees about the county council’s passage of the FY27 budget. He characterizes it as “a mixed bag” that avoids the worst outcomes but creates a need for adjustments as well as a structural deficit that will need to be closed next year. (Council Member Dawn Luedtke also pointed out the latter issue in her budget statement.)
Taylor’s video is embedded below along with a transcript of his remarks.
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Good afternoon, team MCPS. This is your superintendent, Thomas Taylor, and I know that you have a million things going on right now, and I apologize for yet another interruption, but this is important, and I wanted to catch you before the weekend got too underway.
You guessed it, we need to talk about budget again. And I wanted to update you on what happened today and what you can expect in the coming weeks. Today, the Montgomery County Council took important straw votes that provide much needed clarity about funding for MCPS in the next year. This is in anticipation for the budget’s final vote next Thursday by county council.
Today’s update is a mixed bag. First, the good news. The vote today significantly improves our funding picture that concerned us earlier this week. Special thanks really do go to our county council for finding creative solutions to position us a lot better than we were before and to save hundreds of MCPS jobs. This was huge.
And more importantly, thank you. You shared important information and stories with our county council to tell them about your positive impact in our community. It made a huge difference. Bravo. Though far from ideal, you improved the position for hundreds of our teammates and ultimately our kids. Thank you.
The really frustrating part with all of this, or at least it is for me, is that this has kind of become like an annual journey for us during budget season where we as MCPS and educators, we have to explain our value to our funding partners. It is really just exhausting. And with over 70% of our teammates living in Montgomery County and paying taxes, the idea of gas and grocery prices somehow magically don’t impact you or the system, that’s a real problem. You are an essential part of our community and the stewards of our entire community’s future. And your ability to provide for yourself and for your families has to be a community priority. And I’m glad that our county council elevated this as a priority this year, which brings me to the two pieces of bad news.
First, this budget is still a significant reduction from our request. We will need to reconcile this gap in the coming weeks. There’s no escaping it. Next week, I will formally propose reductions to meet the $36 million gap that we will need to close. There are several pieces that our team and I need to refine in order to finalize the reduction plan so that we don’t impact operations wherever possible. And as you’ve already seen, our choices are awful.
I will keep this really simple for you. My goal is to keep reductions as far away from the classroom as possible without drastically impacting operations. As I’ve said to you before, 90% of our budget is people. It’s you. Specifically, how many people we employ as a school system and how much we pay them. Those are our two main choices for looking at reductions. And even though this is a more favorable budget outcome than what we were looking at earlier this week, the changes we will need to make to close our $36 million gap will be significant and they will impact services to students and families. There is no running from that. I sincerely wish that it was different and I am sorry for that.
To this end, here’s what you can expect in the coming weeks. The next step in our process is for the county council to finalize their actions next Thursday with a final vote. Following that vote, I will present some recommendations to the board of education to close our $36 million gap that remains in our budget. The board of education will consider this recommendation and then vote on a reconciled and balanced budget on June 4th. This is a remarkably tight timeline with significant gravity in the decisions and none of those decisions will be easy. But I promise you we will continue to update you as we have new information.
The second piece of bad news is what this means for next year. Not just in terms of our operations, but also in terms of our financial standing. Because we used one-time money to balance our operating budget for FY27, we will start the next fiscal year FY28 budget process with a structural deficit. What this means, and I’ll translate for you, is that before we even start building our budget process next year, we will begin with a negative number that we need to close. This should be a giant red flag for everyone and cause for tremendous concern because it means that next year’s budget process will be even more difficult.
Look, I know that you’re exhausted, not just because it’s May and there’s a lot going on, but because of this, and unfortunately, we need to continue to tell our story and to demonstrate our value. To that end, I want you to know that I have every faith in you and the rest of our teammates. We will continue to show Montgomery County each and every day the value that we bring to our community today and tomorrow. Thank you for stepping up.
You are team MCPS and you make Montgomery County a great place to live, work, and learn.