As Maryland lawmakers put their final touches this week on the state’s budget plan, Baltimore City school leaders say the jurisdiction is being left out of key education funding meant to combat poverty.
The state’s spending plan, which must pass in both chambers by Monday, includes a complex formula for distributing $7.5 billion in state aid tied to the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future reform in fiscal year 2024. The Blueprint fundamentally aims to send more resources to students who need them — such as those living in high concentrations of poverty.
Research suggests poor students living in a neighborhood with a high percentage of poverty face a double disadvantage over their peers from wealthier households in neighborhoods with more resources.
Baltimore City school administrators have warned a key component of the General Assembly’s formula for calculating poverty shuts out the jurisdiction from accessing some of the money meant to help its neediest schools.
The criticism stems from lawmakers’ decision to use federal Medicaid data in its formula for distributing aid to schools meant to alleviate poverty. Maryland previously used the number of students qualifying for free and reduced-price meals as a proxy for estimating poverty, but the metric undercounted students in part because it relied on families to turn in forms to school systems.
The General Assembly’s switch to using Medicaid data to calculate how many students meet the poverty threshold has turned up an extra 110,000 students, which officials estimate will cost the state $390 million more than expected. However, none of those students come from Baltimore, city school administrators said.
“The repercussions of not having a consistent way to count poverty are becoming more impactful as we implement the Blueprint,” testified Alison Perkins-Cohen, chief of staff for Baltimore City schools, in Annapolis earlier this month.
Baltimore’s school system won’t see any of the additional $390 million because the city joined a federal universal free lunch and breakfast program in 2015, changing the way the jurisdiction calculated poverty.
The city instead uses “direct certification” to automatically count the number of families participating in federal public assistance programs such as food stamps.
Officials say that status has at times caused an inequitable distribution of funds meant to alleviate economic difficulties some students face more than others. When the Trump administration discouraged immigrants’ use of public assistance, city school leaders feared children from immigrant families were being undercounted in poverty estimates.
“We’ve been raising this alarm for years,” Perkins-Cohen said. “The idea that we’re implementing [a formula] that leaves the poorest district out is unconscionable.”
Maryland State Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury said there’s a better metric that uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau to determine a family’s socioeconomic status for funding allocation purposes. The Maryland State Department of Education in October submitted a 71-page report to the General Assembly outlining the methodology for calculating the state’s compensatory education and concentration of poverty funding using a neighborhood tier system.
The methodology would take into account each student’s environment, as well as their family’s socioeconomic status to calculate how much aid their school would receive.
“This is the better way,” Choudhury testified to lawmakers earlier this month. “It’s all about making sure we weight the depths of poverty that our students are in and we give them the adequate funding that they need in order to ensure excellent educational outcomes for these students.”
For example, Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key and Lakeland elementary/middle schools both serve roughly the same number of economically disadvantaged students, meaning they would receive the same amount of relative funding under the state’s current formula. However, nearly all of Lakeland’s students live in neighborhoods that are considered high-poverty areas under the state’s neighborhood tier system. Meanwhile, Francis Scott Key students have a more equal split among the five economic tiers.
Those differences should, in theory, grant Lakeland a larger increase in funding under the Blueprint plan, the MSDE report states.
Choudhury and Perkins-Cohen testified this session in favor of House Bill 1211, sponsored by Baltimore City Del. Stephanie Smith, which would alter the Blueprint formula to instead use the Maryland Neighborhood Tier System to distribute aid to schools. The bill did not pass to the Senate before the “Crossover Day” deadline, meaning it faces more hurdles to passing before the end of the legislative session.
The funding dispute comes on the heels of another defeat for Baltimore City school system in a Maryland court earlier this month. Civil rights attorneys had asked the court to revisit a decades-old lawsuit, Bradford v. Maryland State Board of Education, claiming the state has failed repeatedly to provide enough funding city schools.
The judge ruled against the plaintiffs, stating the Maryland Constitution and Supreme Court of Maryland delegate school funding decisions to the political branches of government, not the courts.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
