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Montgomery County schools leaders are worried.

Their school system — Maryland’s largest, with about 160,000 students — is trying to comply with a state mandate to expand prekindergarten. It needs help from private providers, but nowhere near enough have signed up. The county fears it will end up violating the requirements of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, a landmark <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/maryland-advances-landmark-education-bill-that-boosts-funding-for-public-schools/2019/04/02/6918f40e-5577-11e9-8ef3-fbd41a2ce4d5_story.html" target="_blank">education reform</a> law.

Virtually all of state’s other 23 public school districts are scrambling to meet the timeline for the overhaul and are panicked that they won’t have the resources to do it.

Across Maryland, public school districts are racing to adapt to the decade-long Blueprint, <a href="https://blueprint.marylandpublicschools.org/funding-2/" target="_blank">which the state says</a> calls for increasing annual spending on education to more than $3.8 billion when the law is fully implemented. The law requires districts to boost teacher pay and special-education funding, emphasizes aid for students who live in poverty, and seeks a more diverse and qualified teaching corps. Its proponents say it will make Maryland schools world-class and narrow achievement gaps. The Blueprint passed in 2021, when supporters from both parties in the General Assembly overrode a veto from then-Gov. Larry Hogan (R). But the measure got off to a bumpy start when the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">coronavirus</a> pandemic closed schools and changed government priorities. In 2022, the legislature pushed back implementation dates.

Today, state legislators say they know the law needs a few updates to help school districts meet the mandates. State Sen. Nancy J. King (D-Montgomery), who chairs the education subcommittee of the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee, said in an interview that the legislature will have to do “some tweaking of the law” though will not perform “major surgery.”

But advocates, education wonks and district officials around the state say adjustments at the margin simply won’t solve the problems — they say the changes must be much more dramatic. The looming crisis could “potentially threaten Blueprint implementation” if lawmakers don’t act, the Maryland Association of Counties (MACo), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that advocates on behalf of the state’s counties, said <a href="https://conduitstreet.mdcounties.org/wp-content/uploads/MACo-Blueprint-letter-to-Gov.-Moore-October-2023.pdf" target=_blank>in a letter sent</a> in November to Gov. Wes Moore (D) and legislative leaders.

“The Blueprint applies a one-size-fits-all approach to education investment and implementation that does not account for our state’s diverse local government capacities, processes, and abilities,” the letter said. It highlighted financing as a particular problem.

A spokesman for Moore, who has been supportive of the Blueprint, would not comment on the letter or the reforms.

Gov. Wes Moore asks for ‘trust’ ahead of Maryland’s looming budget cuts

School systems say they have struggled the most with the first of the Blueprint’s five reform pillars: early-childhood education. It calls for an expansion of pre-K and envisions a “mixed-delivery system” in which private and public providers serve an equal number of students.

“We have to recognize the reality on the ground,” MACo Executive Director Michael Sanderson said in an interview. “The law says we need the expansion by 2024. But we just don’t have the space, and we don’t have the people.”

For the current fiscal year, which ends in mid-2024, districts were supposed to have 30 percent of pre-K services delivered by private providers who are receiving public funds to ease the burden on public schools. But no school system in Maryland has reached that threshold, according to a state official on the Blueprint’s Accountability and Implementation Board — and it’s unclear if any will. The state offered grants to incentivize providers but few took them.

Queen Anne’s County on the Eastern Shore has just one private provider. Frederick County said it would have 2 percent of its pre-K services delivered by private providers this school year; it asked for a state waiver from the requirement, saying that “we only have 20 slots available from a single private provider.” Officials from the Maryland State Department of Education denied that provider’s request to create 20 more slots, and grant applications from others were also denied.

Montgomery County appeared to be in a better position to implement the Blueprint, according to a <a href="https://dls.maryland.gov/pubs/prod/Educ/LocalFiscalImpactofImplementingtheBlueprintforMarylandsFuture.pdf" target=_blank>2022 legislative report</a>, but only 11 percent of the county’s pre-K needs are currently met by private providers. During a Montgomery County Board of Education meeting in September, school board member Lynne Harris (At Large) said she was “concerned about the current imbalance in where we need to be, especially when the goal is — just in three years — we will be at a 50-50 delivery system.”

In addition to early-childhood education, the other Blueprint pillars include high-quality and diverse teachers, college and career readiness, more resources for students to be successful, and governance and accountability. Each pillar has a list of prescriptive actions that school systems are supposed to take by a certain deadline.

The Washington Post spoke to officials tasked with implementing the Blueprint in a handful of school districts, and all of them said they were worried they could not possibly comply with the pre-K requirements. According to the Blueprint, school districts are supposed to expand pre-K to some 3- and all 4-year-olds by <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aMnDWMe09almYHZD6tJExc5yIHGbawU8/edit#gid=1123187994" target=_blank>fiscal year 2032</a>.

Some districts say they don’t have the physical space to expand. Matthew Kibler, director of accountability and implementation for Queen Anne’s County Public Schools, said many of the system’s 15 schools do not have room to accommodate universal pre-K. He said in an email that the district would be able to bring in eligible 4-year-olds from low-income families but that expanding further “presents a large challenge.”

Frederick County Public Schools officials were “encountering significant challenges,” they wrote in an <a href="https://www.fcps.org/blueprint/plan" target=_blank>implementation plan</a> submitted in March. They weren’t sure if they could transport 3-year-olds safely because the system’s buses lack seat belts.

Another problem is finding staff members to teach the youngest children. The Blueprint law was written in 2019 before the pandemic; since then, shortages have plagued schools nationwide, including in Maryland.

Making things more complicated, Mohammed Choudhury, the state schools superintendent hired by the Maryland Board of Education to oversee the implementation of the Blueprint, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/10/02/acting-maryland-superintendent-named/" target="_blank">resigned</a> this past fall after stories emerged in The Post and elsewhere <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/07/21/mohammed-choudhury-maryland-schools-superintendent-criticism/" target="_blank">about a toxic management style</a> and clashes with the Maryland Accountability and Implementation Board, which was created by the legislature to oversee the Blueprint work led by the Maryland State Department of Education. Several high-ranking officials in the Department of Education’s finance office have also left.

Sanderson said rather than “dwell” on the full 10 years of implementation right now, “Maryland policymakers should focus on what is expected to happen over the next three years. How do we slay this dragon of prekindergarten and early-childhood education? How do we find the space and the educators? Let’s be practical.”

Sources on the Accountability and Implementation Board spoke with reporters from The Post on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the panel’s work. They said the AIB would not back conceptual overhauls to the Blueprint but would support some changes to make it work better, such as shifting some state dollars to ensure low-income students get adequate funding.

State Senate Budget and Taxation Chairman Guy Guzzone (D-Howard) said he often hears complaints about the law from counties and school districts. Most say they have various programs in place, but those don’t align precisely with the Blueprint.

“They don’t want to give up on those, and that’s understandable. But it’s also clear that they need to do the things that are associated with the extra moneys we’re sending to them,” he said. “And so it’s been a constant refrain of, ‘How can we do it all?’”

Two years into implementation, the Blueprint continues to have wide public support. Coordinators from local school systems say they are committed to rolling it out. But the law’s deadlines are tricky.

“School districts are all in. We support the intent. We have had some tremendous successes,” said Katie Ridgway, Harford County Public Schools director of strategic initiatives and the school district’s Blueprint coordinator. She says Harford is working to “decrease the barriers so that we can actually help students and realize the vision of the Blueprint.”

Many of the worries come back to money. The state has appropriated funds for the Blueprint through 2028, but its mandates extend through the 2032 fiscal year. The law’s initiatives are funded by a mixture of state and local funds. Over the years, counties are supposed to bear more of the costs. They’re not sure they can foot the bill.

In the letter from MACo, officials said they needed a “more comprehensive cost analysis” from the state about their fiscal responsibilities under the law. “Many associated costs were excluded” from the Blueprint estimate, it said, “including but not limited to the cost of pre-k classroom space, CTE classroom modifications, career ladder implementation costs, out-of-classroom time for teachers, and additional staffing support for special education and English learners.”

The MACo letter warned that the Blueprint’s costs could limit their ability to fund other governmental needs — such as public safety and emergency management, public health, social services, and transportation.

Another challenge is that the Blueprint requires teachers to earn a minimum of $60,000 by fiscal year 2026, which would be extremely difficult for some poor counties to fund. Last school year in Garrett County, for instance, <a href="https://www.marylandpublicschools.org/about/Documents/DCAA/SSP/20222023Staff/2022-2023_Professional_Salary_Schedules.pdf" target=_blank>entry-level teachers made</a> $47,849. A sudden shift there and elsewhere could skew the salary ranges for non-teachers in the school system, too.

The push for highly qualified teachers may also create problems for districts, Sanderson said, because of Blueprint rules that teachers should be certified to win bonuses and jobs. The certification takes a long time, and there is worry that it could prevent other quality teachers who don’t have it from being rewarded. Sanderson said that these rules may preclude excellent teachers without these qualifications from being hired and that the state should loosen the requirements and allow for expedited or alternative certification.

Counties echoed similar concerns when the Maryland General Assembly passed the Bridge to Excellence in Public Schools Act — known colloquially as the Thornton plan — back in 2002. The law similarly proposed an overhaul of education, including a new finance plan to offset funding inequities in education. Alvin Thornton, for whom that plan was nicknamed, called county leaders’ letter about the Blueprint plan “expected and anticipated” in a recent interview with The Post.

“This is where we should make sure that education is funded as an extension of a state responsibility,” said Thornton, a retired Howard University professor and four-time chair of the Prince George’s County Board of Education. “The debate that you’re going to get from people is local jurisdictions cannot fund their share. I’ve always rejected — and I know this is a philosophical point — I’ve always rejected that as a starting position.”

“The question now is whether or not the state will create a revenue stream,” Thornton continued.

Thornton said that legislators could ease the financial pressures by extending the timeline for implementation. But he hopes the General Assembly doesn’t waive any of the mandates — which is how it tackled issues with the Thornton plan. That move “substantially hurt” the 2002 law, and it would be a “critical mistake” this time as well.

State House Ways and Means Committee Chairwoman Vanessa E. Atterbeary (D-Howard) said lawmakers could slow the implementation, but not too much.

“We can’t make a commitment to our kids and our teachers and say, ‘Sike, we were just kidding,’” she said. “At some point, we have to put the foot on the gas and go.”

A previous version of this article mistakenly said the Maryland Association of Counties advocates on behalf of the state’s school systems. The nonprofit advocates for counties. The article has been corrected. 

University of Kansas, BS in journalism

Nicole Asbury is a local reporter for The Washington Post covering education and K-12 schools in Maryland.

Nicole Asbury

Bachelor's degree: University of Miami. Master's degree: Northwestern University

Valerie Strauss is an education writer who runs the Answer Sheet blog. She came to The Washington Post as an assistant foreign editor for Asia in 1987 and weekend foreign desk editor after working for Reuters as national security editor and a military/foreign affairs reporter on Capitol Hill. She also previously worked at UPI and the L.A. Times. 

Valerie Strauss

Rutgers University

Ovetta Wiggins covers Maryland state politics in Annapolis. She came to The Washington Post in 2003 and previously worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Bergen Record in New Jersey.

Ovetta Wiggins

washpost

Maryland’s Blueprint education plan is too costly and complex, advocates say

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Education Funding Maryland

Jay Mathews

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