Maryland senators gave their version of Governor Wes Moore’s proposed bill to revise the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future the green light Wednesday, setting up a negotiation between the two chambers in the coming days.
The unanimously-approved Senate version restores Moore’s four-year delay to funds for in-school teacher planning called “collaborative time,” which House delegates had reduced to a one-year delay. It also protects funding for community schools and vulnerable student populations, such as those with disabilities and multilingual learners.
These fiscal changes, among others, add up to saving the state roughly half of the $1.6 billion originally budgeted by the governor’s proposal. Senators tout their version as a compromise between the governor’s significant rollbacks and the House’s largely unchanged version of the Blueprint.
But Riya Gupta, interim director of Blueprint advocacy nonprofit Strong Schools Maryland, disagreed.
“I don’t see it as a compromise. I see it as a walk-back on the promise that was made,” she told WYPR. “The Senate bill does not take a stand with students, teachers and parents around Maryland in investing in education.”
Wednesday’s vote came on the heels of over four hours of heated hearings in the Senate Education, Energy and the Environment Committee early this week. Much of the debate centered around a provision originally proposed by Moore to hire 200 coaches, who will serve as in-school mentors for teachers statewide, over the next four years.
Sen. Katie Fry Hester, a Democrat representing parts of Carroll and Howard counties, said spending $170 million on an untested program over the next four years, as the state faces a budget crisis, feels irresponsible.
“I struggle with this,” she said in a hearing Tuesday. “I mean, it might be a good idea, but when we passed the Blueprint for Maryland's Future, we'd done three years of research.”
The state already employs just over 800 of these coaches, a strategy that staff for Superintendent Carey Wright said is one of her most important priorities for teacher retention. But five districts employ 63% of the coaches, and three districts don’t have any.
“This is giving relevant experience, on-the-spot job-embedded support to our teachers,” said Elise Brown, assistant state superintendent of instructional programs. The measure wound up staying in the Senate-side bill.
Gupta said all changes proposed to the Blueprint this session feel rushed.
“We're watching scary and potentially decade-long implications being proposed at the last hour,” she told WYPR. “The Blueprint is fully funded as it is for the next two years, so why are we making extremely rash decisions to zero out some structural deficit that is in our future?”
One of her main concerns, Gupta said, is an emergency measure put in the Senate bill that says if state revenue projections decline by more than 3.75% between March and December, school funding stays flat for the following fiscal year.
Members of the House and Senate will have to reconcile the differences between their two versions of the bill before the legislative session ends at 11:59 p.m. on April 7.
