Baltimore County officials announced a plan Tuesday for its employees to get pay raises and bonuses up to 11% but final details were not shared. This ends a weeks-long squabble between County Executive Johnny Olszewski and the school system over how much to give educators and how to pay for it. But if this plan was being graded by a Baltimore County teacher, it might get an “incomplete” because not all the details have been released.
Teachers will get retention bonuses, but no word on when or how much. Baltimore County Public School leaders are promising to cut its budget by nearly $20 million to help pay for raises but there are no details on where those cuts will be made.
No written plan was shared with reporters during Tuesday’s news conference.
Nonetheless, County Executive Johnny Olszewski and other county officials spoke glowingly about what has been hammered out.
“It is fiscally responsible and it is sustainable while still putting tens of millions of dollars in the pockets of our hard working educators,” Olszewski said.
Officials said the current proposal will cost $76 million this fiscal year.
Teachers will get a 3% raise six months earlier than planned. It was going to take effect in January 2023. It’s now retroactive to this past July.
Employees also are getting back a pay increase they lost a couple of years ago due to budget cuts and all staff will be getting bonuses.
Much of the cost will be offset by those unspecified budget cuts, more than $30 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act money and the school system spending some of its budget surplus.
School Superintendent Darryl Williams said the compensation plan represents an increase of between 7 and 11% for employees.
“These are wins,” Williams said. “It’s a small win but it’s a win in the right direction and we still have more work to do.”
Cindy Sexton, the president of TABCO, the Teachers Association of Baltimore County, disputed the county’s presentation. Sexton counters that the bottom end of the teacher pay raise is closer to 5%, not 7%.
Sexton said this is a step in the right direction but that this is not as good for teachers as an earlier plan that had been negotiated by the union and the school system. That plan would have cost $500 million and teachers would have gotten a pay raise of roughly 8% but it was rejected by the county executive and council.
Sexton said that more needs to be done and that the union is not finished.
“We will continue to do this,” Sexton said. “We can have all of the great curriculum, all the great schools, but there is an educator crisis and it is real and it is affecting our students and we need to do all we can to fix that.”
Olszewski said school officials had no long-term plan to pay for the raises previously promised to teachers. He said there might have to be tax increases to cover the $500 million cost and that wasn’t going to happen.
Also what irked Olszewski and members of the county council about that earlier deal was that it was struck after the county had passed its budget for the year so the money for the raises wasn’t there.
“This is not the typical budgeting practice,” Olszewski said. “So it is our hope we can return to finding ways through the normal budgeting process to identify continued investments in the men and women who deliver educational excellence here in Baltimore County.”
Olszewski hopes he can ensure the school system is accountable for its promised budget cuts when it comes asking for around $2 billion for next year’s education budget.
“We are confident that the system will produce the cuts and the savings that they identified,” Olszewski said. “When they submit their fiscal 24’ budget, which is the appropriate venue to find ways to do even more, which is what we’ll try to do next year.”
Sexton said this new deal needs to be ratified by the union which she hopes will happen as early as Friday.
