Baltimore County school board approves temporary budget committee ahead of challenging fiscal year

The Baltimore County school board has formed a special committee to oversee the district’s $2.78 billion budget and help develop the district’s spending wishlist for fiscal year 2027.

This comes nearly 17 months after the board dissolved a similar workgroup, opting instead to make budget talks part of time-limited regular school board meetings. At the time, board members said all board members needed to be as knowledgeable about the budget as committee members.

But Julie Henn, who represents Councilmanic District 5, said the result has been overly limited discussions of spending priorities.

“It’s the board’s budget, and without a committee, we cannot effectively facilitate the work of developing the budget,” Henn told The Baltimore Sun on Wednesday. Committees allow for deeper dives into topics and don’t have speaking time limits as members do during full board meetings, she said. Developing the budget and its priorities in a full meeting is “impractical,” Henn said.

“We have almost a $3 billion budget, and to ask us to do our work within a three-minute time limit for asking questions in a full board session is impossible,” Henn said.

Meanwhile, the district is bracing for an uncertain economy in the coming year. Superintendent Myriam Rogers said the school district has prepared itself “for what we know will be another challenging fiscal landscape,” during a news conference on Tuesday.

The school district’s multibillion-dollar budget, about half of which is funded by the county, accounts for roughly half of the county’s yearly spending. The Baltimore County Council votes to approve funding for the school district after a proposal from the county executive.

Though the district’s budget proposal hasn’t been announced yet, Rogers said fiscal year 2027 spending requests “will be aligned to the county target of a 2% increase above what we received in FY26.” Last year, Baltimore County provided about 6.5% less funding than the school district requested, resulting in a budget shortfall that required renegotiating the district’s union contracts, among other cost-saving measures.

Rogers is scheduled to present her budget proposal for fiscal year 2027 to the board in January 2026.

The board’s vice chair, Robin Harvey, voted against Henn’s proposal to re-form the former standing committee. Instead, she said, an ad hoc budget committee would be “an opportunity for the board to suss it out during this budget season” and to see whether it would add value to the board’s operations.

Board chair Jane Lichter did not respond on Wednesday to questions on when the new ad hoc committee would begin meeting.

Have a news tip? Contact Racquel Bazos at rbazos@baltsun.com , 443-813-0770 or on X as @rzbworks.