Baltimore County school district leaders are offering to give teachers and school staff the raises promised by their union contracts — six months after they expected to receive them.
At a board meeting Tuesday, Superintendent Myriam Rogers announced that her team secured funding to give educators their 5% raises starting January 1, 2026. The increases were supposed to hit July 1.
“I will not pretend that anybody wants to move forward on a delayed schedule,” Rogers said. “None of us wanted to be here.”
Last month, the county council passed a version of next year’s budget that left the school system $38 million short of what they needed to boost educator pay.
“Many are asking what has changed since we agreed to a three-year compensation package,” Rogers said during Tuesday’s meeting. “Fiscally, everything has changed.”
The federal government currently funds over 1,200 county school positions that are no longer guaranteed, she said. And the state government is facing a several-billion-dollar deficit.
“We know that federal has an impact on state, state has an impact on local,” Rogers said. “We made a [budget] request based on what we needed. The local county government had to make some tough decisions as well.”
Outside the board meeting, hundreds of educators flooded the lawn of the district’s central offices, creating a sea of union-red T-shirts. They held signs reading, “Keep your word” and “teachers with pay are teachers who stay.”
“We are going to use every single tool we have to keep fighting,” said Cindy Sexton, president of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County (TABCO). “We’re here to fight for dignity, for our educators, equity for our students and justice for all.”
Sexton said the union has filed an impasse with the state public employee relations board, which could launch further negotiations between district leaders and staff unions.
But staff said they’re already seeing colleagues leave – including at least 18 school psychologists. In the name of budget constraints, district leaders reduced psychologists’ terms from 12 months to 10.
“They cut our pay by nearly 20%,” said Annmarie Cote, who has worked as a psychologist in Baltimore County schools for over 23 years. “These preventable departures will result in over 30 schools that will not have direct access to a school psychologist next school year.”
That will impact over 17,000 students, Cote said.
“This number will likely increase as school psychologists continue to leave BCPS at an alarming rate,” she said. “And we won’t be able to recruit new school psychologists as we are not competitive any longer.”
Cote said she thinks the “powers that be” expect remaining staff to fill the gaps.
“The problem is, we have nothing left to give,” she said.
Rogers said district leaders are looking for areas that are over-staffed to eliminate positions, with priority on non-teaching positions like assistant vice principals. Over 90 central office positions have been cut already, she said.
“Our decision was either to increase class size across the board based on enrollment, and we heard quite loud and clear from all stakeholders that we wanted to do everything to avoid increasing class sizes across the board…or eliminate over-staffing,” Rogers said.
Sexton, president of TABCO, called on board of education members to do more.
“A failure of any organization is ultimately a failure of the board,” she said to members during Tuesday’s meeting. “Not the president, not the superintendent, but the board itself.”
The board’s main responsibility is to prevent financial and operational crisis, Sexton said. Right now, Baltimore County schools are experiencing both.
“Can you look at yourself in the mirror, or better yet, can you look at the students you are here to serve, and say you have done your due diligence?” she asked.
