Children of Montgomery County, we need to talk.
You’ve probably noticed a lot of administrative screaming and hair-pulling, even some bureaucratic plate-smashing. Things are tense, when it comes to the schools budget. But know this: Mommy (the school board) and Daddy (the county government) still love you.
They just hate each other.
It’s a fair conclusion, given the letters — warmly delivered as press releases — flying back and forth between County Council President Valerie Ervin and School Board President Christopher Barclay, regarding “millions of dollars” that school officials “suddenly discovered” after budget negotiations, as characterized by Ervin.
She asks: Are the schools still planning to cut dozens of positions from the school system? Are school employees going to remain exempt from paying larger shares of their health benefits, like other county employees?
She means: Are you kidding me? “As you know, the Council’s budget action explicitly assumed a multi-million dollar reducation associated with a minor increase in school employee cost-sharing,” Ervin wrote Barclay.
Barclay, to say the least, was not pleased. In a return-letter (press release) to Ervin, he said she and the rest of the council “disposed of the MCPS budget in only a few minutes” at many a meeting. “Is it realistic to raise the important issue of health insurance now, when work on the operating budget is complete?”
Things were frosty even before the county council sliced the school budget $25 million below County Exec Ike Leggett’s recommended reductions, but extra cuts certainly didn’t help. “When you had the chance to save school programs, you did not think that was such a high priority, but now that the budget is complete, you say it is.”
Barclay said the board is discussing salary and benefit possibilities with its teachers’ union — and indicated to the county council in April that they’d reduce healthcare expenditures by $15 million — leaving him “surprised to hear from you” on the matter.
But the real zinger, hands down, comes toward the bottom of Barclay’s four-page letter addressed to “The Honorable Valerie Ervin”:
“Your continued disrespect of me and my colleagues on the Board of Education in statements to the media is unacceptable and unbecoming of someone in your position.”
For the sake of the kids, we hope these differences are not irreconcilable.
