Maryland’s State House is where much of the debate takes place.

by Evelyn San Miguel ‘26 and Ziv Golan ‘26

The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, passed by the Maryland legislature in 2021, is increasingly resulting in significant concerns around the pragmatism of the costs and execution of the Blueprint’s main objectives. The Blueprint calls for increased funding across all spheres of public education, namely teacher pay and special education programs. Despite being passed through Maryland’s house, the plan has run into increased opposition from Republican legislators along with Governor Wes Moore (D) himself, both of whom support an abridged version of the amended bill to include spending cuts.

A $3 billion dollar gap in the proposed 2026 state fiscal budget has been one of the driving factors behind the concerns the Blueprint has faced, with many Maryland officials wondering how the Blueprint’s lofty targets would be fulfilled. Among the many asks and changes that the Blueprint proposes, over a ten-year period, is changing the ratio of time spent by educators on “collaborative time,” which refers to time spent working on lesson plans and class curriculum. The Blueprint aims to increase collaborative time within the school day; however, this would cut the amount of time teachers spend in the classroom by 20 percent — a task that would require an additional 15,000 teachers to be hired, an improbable goal for a country in the midst of a teacher shortage.

MCPS currently employs around 13,000 teachers for about 160,000 students. This proposed bill would require a national campaign to recruit out-of-state teachers to achieve the ideal of doubling the number of educators in the school system. Additionally, the original bill proposed a $10,000 raise of the base-level pay for new teachers to $60,000 as a way to provide educators with a greater incentive to work in Maryland. Additionally, the plan will require school districts to increase spending in certain spheres, straining resources and budget. Another proposed change to the bill by Moore also includes allowing individual school districts to request an exemption from the proposed raise of baseline pay. This would effectively cancel out any possible advantage that the pay raise would provide, highlighting the difficulty of implementing such an extensive plan.

Another proposed cut to the bill includes a cut of a poverty grant, which is funding that schools obtain based on the number of students that receive free and reduced-cost meals. Although this funding freeze could save money overall, it would pose detrimental effects to the future of such schools, whose communities and students rely on the funding to maintain school services that are offered to low-income students. Investing in the future of these schools ensures that these students are able to access the same educational opportunities as other Maryland students. Although cuts to the bill could provide a gateway for the full services of the Blueprint to go into effect, without proper access to funds the bill could pull money away from other areas of support within the state budget.