The Calvert County Board of Education approved a budget Thursday that is virtually the same as the current year. It totals $191,541,688, compared to this year’s $191,523,537. The $18,152 increase is only 0.009 percent, not quite one one-hundredth of one percent.
A total of 48.5 positions are cut, including 34 that could not be reduced through attrition. Depending on the results of ongoing negotiations with the Calvert Education Association, there could be more positions eliminated.
The proposed budget, which will now go to the Board of County Commissioners for final approval, shows reductions in almost every area. Among them: instructional salaries, textbooks and supplies, administration, health services, maintenance and capital outlays.
Those are more than offset by increase in other instructional costs (data analysis, online training for teachers, field trips, unemployment costs, college advisory services, etc.), fixed charges, student services and transportation. That last, driven by recent jumps in fuel prices, is the largest, totaling $630,206 — nearly 35 times the overall budget increase.
A big impact to the budget came with the virtual ending of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding. It fell from $3,153,685 in the current budget to only $600,000, a drop of $2,553,685.
According to the budget document, the various cuts mean “fewer employees in the central office to do the work of the school system in areas such as compliance, safety and implementation of mandates” and “fewer employees in the schools to do the work in areas such as instructional support, learning interventions, and well-maintained and managed schools.”
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