Montgomery County school initiatives designed to help students most at risk of failing are some of the same initiatives most at risk of being cut in the fiscal 2009 budget.
And County Council members took schools officials to task for their priorities at a meeting Thursday.
County Councilman Marc Elrich said he wished the board would instead have looked to the schools’ central office for cuts, including what he saw as excessive administrators and the “propaganda budget,” or money spent touting the district’s successes.
“We knew we had a great school system long before we started pumping out public relations and glossy brochures,” he said.
Council members wondered why a program that offers after-school and out-of-school services to students unable to pass classes is slated to lose $350,000 in part-time staffing.
Also, the chronically failing Mark Twain High School, which serves about 50 of the county’s most emotionally disturbed youth, has been tapped for an accelerated closure, saving the district more than $1 million. But when half of the students enter the mainstream schools next year, the budget does not allow for an increase in support providers in those schools.
“The support needed for these kids is enormous,” said Elrich, a former fifth-grade teacher at Rolling Terrace Elementary.
“There’s no indication the budget provides that level of support, and that will end up on the teachers,” Elrich said.
Elrich and his colleagues on the education and public safety committees heard testimony Thursday from school officials and principals about efforts to keep failing students in school.
School board members, who adopted the budget on Tuesday and sent it to County Executive Ike Leggett for his approval, were not unaware of the needs or the sacrifices.
“I hate to use the phrase ‘bare bones,’ but [the budget negotiations] speak to the bare bones nature of this budget,” said school board member Christopher Barclay at Tuesday’s meeting. “We’re pulling from a need,” he said.
Barclay had initially hoped to include more “pupil personnel workers,” or staff who act as counselors and liaisons between the school and families of students on the cusp of failure.
Even so, the school board claimed to have done all it could to fund its priorities: investment in its staff and reforms at the middle school level.
