In the days before Anne Arundel County is required to pass its fiscal 2025 budget, the County Council voted to reallocate more than $3 million in education funding in light of the delayed opening of New Village Academy.
The charter high school, originally planned to open this fall in the former Nordstrom space at the Westfield Annapolis Mall, will delay its opening to fall 2025 after being unable to finalize a lease.
At Monday’s budget amendment meeting, the County Council voted 6-1 to repurpose roughly $3 million slated for the school, as well as a $130,000 reduction in the county’s self-insurance fund, to address needs in the county school system in the fiscal 2025 budget. The new fiscal year begins July 1.
More than $2.1 million will go toward pay increases for teachers who lose planning time when covering classes when the teacher is absent, which has happened more frequently since the pandemic, said Matt Stanski, chief financial officer for the school system.
Finding substitute teachers has proven difficult in recent years. .
The remaining funds will be used to restore eight full-time teaching positions for elementary schools with class sizes that exceed 30 students, support pre-K private provider programs, and implement virtual tutoring and homework help programs after school.
Of the 60 proposed amendments to the county’s $2.3 billion budget, most were adopted by the council. Amendments introduced by the council’s three Republican members, however, failed to pass. Those included requests to reduce a one-time $900,000 contribution to the public campaign financing fund and $2.6 million in contributions to the county’s rainy-day fund.
Nathan Volke, a Pasadena Republican, said he’s been a proponent of maximizing the money that goes into the rainy-day fund, but he argued that with this year’s budget, raising taxes and depositing money into that fund don’t necessarily equate.
Under the fiscal 2025 budget, the income tax rate would rise from 2.81% to 2.94% on any income between $50,000 and $400,000 for single residents and between $75,000 and $480,000 for joint filers. Taxes on the first $50,000 of income for single filers and $75,000 for joint filers would remain at the 2.7% rate. The tax rate on income beyond $400,000 for a single person and $480,000 for a couple would remain at 3.2%
“Based on the other cuts that we are proposing, ultimately there would be sufficient funds, that if this council were to cut some other things, we could take the recurring money and not have to increase the income tax rate the way that we are proposing to do it in this budget as of now,” he said Monday.
Chris Trumbauer, the county’s budget officer, emphasized the county’s long-standing policy of maximizing contributions to the fund.
“I’m not going to tell you that the county would fall apart if we didn’t contribute $2.6 million,” he said, “but what I am going to tell you is I don’t know what I would say to the rating agencies next spring when we go through that process and they ask why, for the first time in how many years, did the county decide not to follow their policy of maximizing the funding?”
County Executive Steuart Pittman’s office made several additions to the budget Tuesday, including a one-time grant for a Maryland Hall program for art students, funding for a new library position and a contractual cost increase for mass notifications for the county’s Office of Emergency Management, among others.
Though funding for New Village Academy was redistributed, Pittman and the County Council are also hoping to give the school a one-time grant of $500,000 to invest in the facility.
The County Council will vote on these changes on Friday, the same day it votes on the final budget.
