Montgomery County Councilmember Will Jawando issued the following statement:
This morning, Superintendent Taylor sent the Council a document that should stop every one of us in our tracks. It lists, in granular detail, exactly who gets eliminated from Montgomery County Public Schools if we fail to fund them.
Right now, as you read this, MCPS employees are receiving notices that their jobs may be gone in July. Teachers. Social workers. Counselors. Family engagement specialists. Maintenance staff. People who walk into our school buildings every day and give our children the best of themselves. Every resident of Montgomery County deserves to understand what the abstract debate over “MCPS funding” actually means.
Cut $18 million: 70 elementary school media assistants who help our youngest children fall in love with reading. 25 high school and 12 middle school social workers trained to sit with students through suicidal ideation, family crisis, and abuse. 39 English Composition Assistants. 25 College and Career Navigators serving first-generation students with no one at home to help them navigate financial aid. $1.6 million cut from Student Well-Being Mental Health, in a year when federal mental health funding is collapsing around us.
Cut $35 million: 17 EML Therapeutic Counselors serving the children of immigrant families, the children watching the federal government threaten their families, stripped of the counselors trained to help them carry that fear. 30 Special Education Resource Teachers. 27 Pupil Personnel Workers.
Cut $53 million: 183 Staff Development Teachers, the instructional coaches who train every classroom teacher in our system.
Cut $71 million: 220 middle school teachers. Out of classrooms. Gone.
Funding our schools is not a budget priority among many. It is a duty. To every parent who moved here for our schools, every teacher who chose Montgomery County over higher private school pay, every taxpayer who has invested in this system for decades, trusting the next generation would inherit something good.
We face a real $189 million structural deficit. To address the challenges we face, Councilmember Jawando worked to find reductions outside MCPS: itemized cuts across County government, idle balances reclaimed from reserves that never closed any deals, unspent contractor appropriations, capital diversions. Every other tool must be exhausted before we ask our schools to absorb cuts.
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Councilmember Jawando has proposed a measured MCPS reduction that asks the school system to share in fiscal discipline alongside every other County department, in a year when shared sacrifice is unavoidable. What he will not support, not under any condition, is a budget that crosses into the deeper tranches of Superintendent Taylor’s framework. He will not vote for the elimination of 183 Staff Development Teachers. He will not vote for the elimination of middle school classroom teachers. He will not vote for the elimination of social workers and college counselors and special educators serving the most vulnerable students in this County.
Superintendent Taylor has shown the Council, in painstaking detail, the price of every dollar we fail to fund. We do not get to look away from this list. We do not get to pretend the cuts are abstract or back-office. They are people. They are services. They are our children’s futures.
We have a duty here. Our schools are the single most consequential institution this County operates. They will determine whether the next generation of Montgomery County is the County we want to leave them. We can find the money. We can make the hard choices everywhere else. We must fund our schools.
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Read the original article at mccouncil