The fate of a controversial bill that aims to reduce school overcrowding in Baltimore County remains up in the air after County Executive Johnny Olszewski vetoed the measure Thursday morning.
County council members approved the update to the Adequate Public Funding Ordinance last Monday with a 4-2 vote. But Olszewski said that the current version of the bill wouldn’t reduce school populations — it would instead create more problems.
“Nowhere is this more clear than in our need to better tackle the attainable housing imperative here in Baltimore County,” he said in a press conference Thursday. “As things stand, there are simply not enough places to adequately house everyone already living in Baltimore County. These are our current students, and failing to provide them with sufficient housing options is affirmatively disinvesting in their future.”
The proposed bill would create a council that reviews applications for new housing developments near overcrowded schools. It also scraps the “adjacency loophole” — which allowed housing projects to continue in overcrowded districts as long as there was a less-crowded school nearby.
Olszewski and Baltimore County school leaders said they’ve already employed different tactics to improve school overpopulation.
“[The county council] has provided $800 million towards school infrastructure needs, resulting in more than 3,000 new seats for students in seven brand new schools — with two more scheduled to open this fall,” Superintendent Myriam Rogers said Thursday.
Rogers also pointed out that there have been multiple redistricting projects this year to alleviate overwhelmed schools. Since 2020, she said the number of schools at or above 115% capacity has been reduced from 27 to ten.
“And of the ten schools that remain on the list, planned additions, new schools or designs for schools options are well underway,” she said.
But council chair and bill sponsor Izzy Patoka said the Adequate Public Funding Ordinance (APFO) updates are an urgently-needed ingredient to address school overcrowding.
“Kicking this down the road will only create additional school overcrowding,” Patoka told WYPR. “And who does this hurt? It hurts our families. It hurts our students. It hurts our future. And it hurts our teachers.”
Patoka cited a study produced by a task force in 2020 that urged the need for APFO updates.
“It's just disheartening the level of inaction that we've taken related to school overcrowding,” Patoka said. “It’s been over three years. Now is the time for action.”
Olszewski said he supports the premise of the APFO bill — but not the details. The bill doesn’t honor all the recommendations of the 2020 taskforce, he said. And Baltimore County school leaders weren’t included in the initial process.
But Cindy Sexton, president of the county teachers union, said they’ve backed the bill from the beginning. The union even had representatives on the taskforce.
“The task force was put together for a reason, because we recognized that there was a problem,” Sexton told WYPR. “There are other ways to look at it. But it seems like we've kind of just been stagnant on those other ways. And so it's going to take a multi-faceted approach.”
Patoka said he’s confident he can attain the five council member votes needed to override Olszewski’s veto by July 1.
Affordable housing vs. school overcrowding?
Yara Cheikh, an education advocate who served on the taskforce study in 2020, said this isn’t a “zero-sum game” between affordable housing and school overcrowding — despite what critics of the bill say.
“We can't say that we're not going to have children inside schools in seats, because we need to have affordable housing,” she said. “We cannot frame this as one or the other. We have to have both.”
But councilman Julian Jones said the proposed bill “was more about anti-housing than anything to do with reducing school overcrowding.”
“I think we must do everything in our power to make sure that Baltimore County is a place that people can afford to purchase a home and live here,” Jones said at Thursday’s press conference. “This bill would have basically shut down home ownership, or new home starts, throughout Baltimore County.”
Jones said he personally filed 30 amendments on behalf of Baltimore County school leaders “to try to make this bill more reasonable.”
Some of those amendments included pushes to exclude affordable housing projects from the need for approval, or to factor funds allocated for school renovation projects into consideration. But none of them passed.
“It's so important that we get it right. And this bill was far, far, far from right,” Jones said at Thursday’s press conference. “How many times do we have a bill with 58 amendments?”
But Cheikh argues that there is time during the bill’s implementation to work out the details.
“This bill doesn't go into full effect immediately,” she said. “So should the veto be overridden by the county council, any changes or hiccups to the bill can be addressed over the course of time of implementation.”
