Many decisions were made at the Montgomery County School Board meeting on Tuesday night as they made their final recommendations for the school budget and ratified the Title 6 certificate.
The Title 6 certificate was passed by a 5-to-1 margin and ensures that Montgomery schools are in compliance with the Department of Education.
“It was basically just certifying that we were honoring the stipulations in Title 6 that we are not discriminating against anybody, and contingent upon that certification was federal funds,” Superintendent Dr. Bernard F Bragen, Jr said.
The $154 million dollar budget needed fine-tuning.
“The starting deficit was about $1.7 million and after the discussion on what we wanted to include and not include in the budget, we’re at zero,” Dr. Bragen said. “I think it’s about $2000 dollars over.”
Recommended cuts included a dual language immersion program. With one school board member expressing concerns that the program could be a target in DEI crackdowns.
“Which was something new, but it’s new, right, so you don’t want to compromise anything.” Dr. Bragen said. “You already have if you want to make a deficit, so we’ll have to wait next year for that.”
Also cut were some school security officers programs despite the hesitancy from some school board members.
“So I think in discussion tonight let’s take that out of the budget and get our towns to provide the SROs (School Resource Officers) that we need,” Dr. Bragen said.
Ideally, for the school board, school security officers would be pulled from the surrounding towns.
Another cut was made regarding free lunches. While free lunches would be removed, free breakfast would stay.
One of the things they chose to cut was the free lunch, but still enable children to have free breakfast. And I think you heard one school board member say it was more important to start the day with a full belly, and that may alleviate some problems down the road.
Other cuts included the number of special education teachers that would be hired, going from 10 to eight, and teacher salary guides.
“We suggested making that guide 15 years so compressing that number, and there’s a cost associated with that,” Dr. Bragen said. “I think the school board compromised and made it 20 steps instead of 15.”
No decision was made on officially adopting the budget
