SNOW HILL– A review provided to county officials this week shows that public education in Worcester County costs about $27,000 per pupil.
A presentation to the Worcester County Commissioners this week analyzes school system funding as it relates to implementation of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. According to county staff, Blueprint implementation shouldn’t cost the county any more than it’s already providing with the current Maintenance of Effort (MOE) funding formula.
“The state is subject to change in each legislative session the overall process or what the funding requirements are, but at this point in time Maintenance of Effort for the requirements at this fiscal year, they estimate it costs $70.7 million to implement the requirements of the Blueprint,” Chief Administrative Officer Weston Young said. “We are funding $100 million.”
As the changes required by the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future move forward, Young provided the commissioners this week with a presentation reviewing the Maintenance of Effort funding formula as well as the new Local Share formula. He said that historically, funding for the school system has been driven by the funding formula known as MOE.
“The funding provided by the county per pupil in the previous year sets the bar for the future year,” Young said.
Worcester Prep tuition is $17,000. Send me a school voucher for my child’s education.
Utter bullshit- there is no way under full implementation that the “Blueprint” won’t end up over and above current MOE. An outside agency cost analysis estimated this will add $6,000 burden per Maryland family to support the “Blueprint” . The blueprint calls for large teacher bonuses for achieveng various certifications. Can’t remember exact amount now but when I read it at the time of passage it looked as if teachers could get up to $15,000 more per year by getting these certifications that I highly doubt will actually improve the quality of education the children are receiving. This is not historically something similar in place, so exactly what would they be cutting in order to implement this? Nothing! Finally, maybe the worst part of this is that the plan calls for basically taking these highly “certified” teachers out of the classroom for significant amounts of time and instead put them to work training other teachers to get these certifications. So even if the certifications aren’t total junk, once a teacher achieves the pinnacle of certification they won’t even be teaching our children using the supposed knowledge they received. I’m with the prevoius commenter, give parents voucher and let them spend them at private schools that are still about actually learning.