Education

Note: this section will be updated frequently as there's a lot to do to give our kids the best chance at having a future they can be proud of. In the meantime, please join our mailing list below.

The deferred ~$200 million Maintenance Backlog

$200 million is the kind of number that makes an effective headline, to get specific we're talking $190-198 million with the real number falling somewhere in the middle. What does this huge amount of money represent? It represents the estimated amount of money that we should have spent on maintaning our schools, but didn't.

How did we get here?

A lot of people have different stories, but the gist is this... Over the last 8 years Calvin Ball allocated $507 million toward HCPSS captial projects, and for better or worse, that number needed to about $25 million more each year on average to keep up with our facilities' needs.

Sure, last year one of our Councilperson Walsh managed to pass legislation that was supposed to direct an additional $38 million of our budget surplus toward school maintenance, but Calvin Ball insisted that only a portion of that could be allocated to schools, and instead the money needed to be reserved for "financial stability" and police expansion.

Is it better to look good on paper, or do good for people?

Howard County boasts a AAA bond rating (it's like a credit score for a non-person entity organization, like a corporation, or a government), and that rating, like any credit score, is important for being able to borrow money. And just like you or me, governments borrow money, and they do it for myriad reasons.

When our leadership did the cost/benefit analysis of letting a facilities and infrastructure maintenance backlog grow, I can only assume that leaving our kids (and teachers and HCPSS staff) to suffer was just the cost of doing business in order to preserve our ability to borrow, sometime in the future, for other capital projects. This was in my estimation, and irrational and irresponsible approach to stewardship and governance. We don't have to do things this way.

Funding our school system is not a business decision, it's an ethical one.

I'm exploring ways we can start to meantinfully hit the reset button with 2028's budget.