The Howard County Board of Education passed a $1.6 billion budget Thursday that
cuts programs and staff
, including third-grade strings, health assistants and elementary gifted and talented educators. The budget also doesn’t include
full-time athletic trainers
for high schools.
“Thank you, members of our community, including our staff, for their active and civil engagement. It remains clear to me that one of the truly great things about our school system is the people in it and the people around it,” Howard County Superintendent Bill Barnes said.
The budget vote was not unanimous. The board’s Linfeng Chen voted against it and Jacky McCoy abstained.
Community members packed into the Howard school board meeting Thursday, spilling into two overflow rooms with signs, most advocating for the board to preserve third-grade strings. Others held signs in support of teachers and health assistants, who also faced cuts. The crowd flopped their signs, held up instruments, erupted in cheers or let out sighs and mumblings.
Despite the community effort and an amendment to save the program by Meg Ricks, board member for District 1, the music program was cut. The program’s elimination impacts 12 positions and will cause students to begin orchestra in fourth grade, the same grade level at which they can start playing band instruments.
The value of the third-grade strings program cannot be measured in monetary terms, student member of the board James Obasiolu said. The program was critical to his experience in the school system and led him to be the principal cellist in the Baltimore Symphony Youth Orchestra.
“I think we must measure it in the understanding that when we give children access to beauty, they learn to create beauty in return. And I think every child deserves what this program gave me,” said Obasiolu, who isn’t allowed to vote on budget matters.
Ricks proposed two more amendments to restore health assistants and the elementary school gifted and talented program. Neither amendment passed. The only addition to the budget was two student engagement liaison positions, originally called “security assistants.”
In the original budget scenario passed by the board on June 4, about 34 health assistant positions would be cut. But after review, Barnes said, cutting that number of health assistants “would create an unacceptable level of risk to the health and safety of our students.”
Barnes recommended instead a reduction of 10 health assistants and the addition of one floating nurse, rather than two. Each school will have one nurse next year, and some will have either a full-time health assistant or one that is shared with another school. When a staff member is absent from a health room, the floating nurse helps provide coverage.
To balance the costs of fewer cuts to health assistants, Barnes said the addition of full-time athletic trainers at the school system’s 13 high schools, which the
community called for
after a student became quadriplegic following a basketball practice, should be cut.
Of the cuts, the restructuring of the elementary school gifted and talented program impacts the most positions – 39. The gifted and talented teachers are certificated, so they will most likely be absorbed into vacant teaching positions, Barnes said.
Students will still have access to all four components of the gifted and talented program offered in elementary school with the restructuring, according to Ebony Langford-Brown, executive director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment for the school system.
However, there will be adjustments to the staff member teaching the component, aside from instructional seminars, Langford-Brown said. There will also be fewer instructional seminars offered due to the reduction in gifted and talented resource teachers, but all primary talent development lessons and curriculum extension units will be taught, she said.
Barnes said the school system will work with individuals in the program to assess “how to best serve the program.”
“Absolutely, the program will be impacted because it’s half as many people, and that’s just, we’re not going to expect one person to do the job of two,” Barnes said.
Shifted expectations for gifted and talented teachers and general education teachers who will pick up some workload are a concern, said Benjamin Schmitt, president of the Howard County Education Association, the union representing teachers.
But the other impactful cut that isn’t receiving as much attention is the elimination of elementary school media paraeducators, Schmitt said. Media paraeducators assist students in the media center, whether it is checking out books, finding materials interesting to them or helping with technology. Book checkouts and technology programs might look different, he said.
“Whatever didn’t get cut now is going to be looked at again next year because [that] has been the process,” Schmitt said. “And I’m personally exhausted on behalf of myself and students and staff that we continue to not be able to have serious conversations about future revenues directed to the school system.”
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