County school leaders say changes needed to the Blueprint education reform plan

The state’s education reform plan needs some reforms itself if it’s to survive a looming multibillion-dollar budget deficit and deliver on its promises, school leaders and local elected officials said Thursday.

The comments at a Maryland Association of Counties conference panel came one day after the Public School Superintendents’ Association of Maryland released a 30-p0int plan for policy and legislative changes to the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, the sweeping school reform plan.

The main message from the panel titled “What We’ve Learned from Learning: The Blueprint in Year Three”: One size does not fit all.

“I’m in my seventh year as superintendent. Over those seven years, I can count on less than one hand the number of times 24 superintendents have come together to agree on something,” said Sean Bulson, superintendent of Harford County Public Schools, one of four panelists at Thursday’s conference.

All the speakers praised the Blueprint, now in its third year. Mostly, the local officials at MACo winter conference in Cambridge said what they want is local flexibility.

Bulson was joined by three other school leaders who highlighted how the plan has helped their school districts. Some of those gains include increased enrollment of 3- and 4-year-olds in prekindergarten, additional resources for students in low-performing schools and expanded opportunities for high school students to take college courses locally for free, a plan known as dual enrollment.

But school leaders said more work is needed.

Among the 30 recommendations in the 12-page document released Wednesday by the superintendent’s association is a call for the Maryland State Board of Education to revise the definition of college and career readiness to include career credentials for students who may not attend college after graduation. It also says the General Assembly should allow “a limited amount of funding” for fiscal management and other administrative duties toward community schools.

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Sen. Karen Lewis Young (D-Frederick), who was at the conference on other business, said the association’s list of recommendations “makes sense.” Lewis Young, who serves on the Senate Education, Energy and the Environment Committee, said she plans to file a bill “that will probably reflect a lot of their requests.”

Nicole Miller, a Blueprint coordinator in Garrett County, said the reform plan needs to include the flexibility to let local school officials assess each school. Miller, who also is her school system’s chief academic officer, noted that schools in the county range from one with 54 students to another with about 900.

With that in mind, the association asks for schools of fewer than 350 students to be waived out of the current 75/25 budget allocation, which requires 75% of state and local funds go to students and the remaining 25% go toward administrative functions.  That change would require legislative approval, but “resources could be freed up for small schools, or to address other unique discrepancies in individual school funding,” with the change, according to the association’s proposal.

Although dual enrollment for apprenticeship programs has increased in Caroline County, Superintendent Derek Simmons said the Blueprint “pillar,” or priority, labeled college and career readiness (CCR) emphasizes opportunities and funding specifically for students who pursue career and technical education.

“The way the Blueprint is written, money goes to those kids who are qualified as CCR,” said Simmons, who was on the MACo panel. “CCR does not provide a focus on students who are [on] free and reduced meals. Looking at the economic challenges that our families face could be a great driver to change the outcome for so many of our students.”

Another panelist, Christina Miller, a Blueprint coordinator in Charles County, said at an elementary school with 800 students in her county has about three or four teachers with at least five years of experience. Miller said the county has the highest number of non-certified teachers in the state.

Another association proposal asks the Accountability and Implementation Board, which oversees the 10-year Blueprint plan, to study the effectiveness of providing National Board Certification when it comes to teacher recruitment and student achievement.

The state Department of Education said in a teacher workforce report in May that slightly more than 1,200, or 74%, of Maryland teachers with certification are concentrated in Anne Arundel, Howard, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.

Currently, those who receive certification are eligible to receive a salary increase of $10,000. Those who teach at an “identified low-performing school” would receive an additional $7,000.

Miller of Charles County said her system continues to work on those incentives, but it’s a challenge given the competition for teachers in the region.

“We are a suburb of Washington, D.C., so we have teachers that will live in Charles,” she said. “The majority of our residents leave the county to go to work, and so they go to Northern Virginia, they go to D.C., and D.C. public schools pay considerably more. So, what are things that are at a lower cost that can get us bigger results to help with the retaining of our teachers?”

That’s a question Howard County Council Chair Deb Jung (D) wants state lawmakers to answer.

“I want state lawmakers to put more money into these incentives for teachers who are board certified to come to these higher poverty schools and relax the guidelines for what is a higher poverty school so we can attract those well-trained teachers back or keep them in the schools that are high poverty,” she said.

One state lawmaker who is pushing for Blueprint changes is Sen. Mary Beth Carozza (R-Lower Shore), who moderated the panel.

“It is not uncommon when we have major transformational legislation and policies to go back and to revisit and to readjust so that those policies can be successful,” she said. “We heard loud and clear that the best way we can make those adjustments are to get the recommendations from the local level.”