Ex officio bill moves on to governor’s desk
Matthew Bieniek
CUMBERLAND — A conference committee has approved $464,103 in additional funding for the Garrett County Public School system for the coming year, said Sen. George Edwards on Wednesday morning.
Both the House and Senate committee members have agreed on the figure, so Edwards expects passage in the final budget. Edwards and Del. Wendell Beitzel are members of the committee. The cash-strapped school system has been forced to consider school closures in the past few years.
“This should be very helpful to the school system and we are still waiting for the legislation introduced by both Delegate Beitzel and I to pass that would help the county out financially until the wealth study is completed,” Edwards said.
A study of the wealth formula is planned to begin in the fall of 2014 and is slated to be complete in 2016. The existing state funding formula can hit school districts with declining student populations hard.
“At the rate we have been impacted by the wealth formula … any help we can get from the state is appreciated,” said Janet Wilson, Garrett County superintendent of schools. The money will help the system move forward and restore some services that have been lost. Wilson mentioned both intervention services and middle school art and music programs. The idea “we don’t have to look at cutting teaching staff or closing schools is a huge relief,” Wilson said. Plans to close additional schools recently were averted when Garrett County commissioners injected additional funding into the school system.
School funding is also an economic development matter, Wilson said, since companies are concerned about the stability of school systems in areas to which they might locate. The idea of schools being closed year after year makes an area a hard sell, Wilson said.
One cost item often overlooked is the sparse population and large land area of the county, which adds to costs for the school system, Wilson said.
Edwards and Beitzel have introduced bills that would help school districts facing a drop in state funding. Edwards’ bill passed the Senate, without a single vote against the bill, and is now in the House.
The school funding bill is designed to help school districts facing decreases in state aid because of declining student enrollment, such as Garrett County. Allegany County has faced a similar problem in the past.
The bill mandates the state to supplement shortfalls in the state aid formula. “For fiscal years 2015 through 2017, if a county board’s total direct education aid in the current fiscal year is less than the prior fiscal year, then the state shall provide a grant to the county board equal to 50 percent of the decrease in total direct education aid from the prior fiscal year to the current fiscal year,” according to the language of SB 534.
The state budget provides $1.7 million in aid for affected districts in fiscal 2015, according to a floor report on the bill by the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee.
