WCBOE, County Commissioners at odds over budget cuts after Worcester County schools funded at maintenance of effort
WORCESTER COUNTY, Md – Worcester County Commissioners and Board of Education members are at odds on the issue of budget cuts submitted by the district after commissioners voted to fund the district for the maintenance of effort.
According to the District, the 1.8 million dollar budget cut has sparked a new round of negotiations between the school, and groups representing the school’s support staff and teachers.
The district also finalized cuts to move forward in the budget, including canceling outdoor graduation, ending summer programming for 2024, and after-school programming starting fall of 2023.
The cuts also included an educational materials reduction of over 50 percent.
“We made negotiations with our teachers and support staff that was sent over that was predicated on getting our budget approved from the commissioners, when that budget was not approved, now we have to go back to renegotiation, and in order to do that, we have to make cuts because we have other expenses that will be affected by not receiving the money from the county commissioners,” said WCBOE President Todd Ferrante.
Ferrante says the cuts were necessary to move forward, but County Commissioner Eric Fiori is questioning why these programs were the ones to receive the drop in funding.
“These are the kind of cuts that are not thought out, these are kind of cuts that are intentionally put in place to put the most detriment on the ones making the decisions and the decisions that are being made by who’s giving them money, being us the Worcester county commissioners,” he said.
Ferrante tells us the cuts were put in place to ensure staffing was not minimized as a result of the district being funded for the maintenance of effort.
“These were the low-hanging fruit that we thought we could cut without hurting. First, we don’t want to cut positions. That’s first and foremost because that’s really that’s very important to our teachers and support staff and to our students to ensure they get a quality education,” he said.
Fiori tells us he’d want to see cuts come from other places, pointing to $55,000 in administrative food costs that were originally budgeted for 3,500 for the current year’s budget.
The school tells us that money went to feeding teachers at training, and other meetings adding that choosing where cuts happen is their job, not the town commissioners.
“The commissioners have always stated that they were not going to micromanage our budget. That’s what, Board of Education officials were elected to do. So we’re elected to make those cuts,” Ferrante said.
WCBOE CFO Vince Tolbert The district’s a 2 point 8 million dollar state increase, that money is tied up in insurance, Maryland Blueprint commission requirements, leaving only 800,000 left, a figure Tolbert says is short of the 1.1 million dollars to bring across the board raises.
