Federal funding cut flows down to schools

As if the State of Maryland didn’t already have enough problems scrounging up money to bridge the great divide between revenues and expenditures for the year ahead, now it must find a way to cover the loss of $418 million in federal education funds it thought it already had.

The Baltimore Banner reported Tuesday that the Trump Administration last Friday reversed course on a pledge to award up to that amount in pandemic recovery funds to Maryland, with U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon saying the department had given the schools too much time to spend the money.

Maybe it did and maybe it didn’t, but that’s beside the point for the schools that have spent their allocations according to the rules and now won’t be reimbursed.

Worcester County Public Schools is among those left holding the empty bag, having spent $512,000 based on state and federal assurances that it would get the money back in a pair of grants. Now, it doesn’t look like that will happen.

While that’s just a small percentage of this school system’s budget, it remains that covering that debt is just one more thing for which local institutions and taxpayers are responsible.

That’s the real rub in all this. As the U.S. Department of Education almost certainly will say it is cutting federal spending, the fact is it is just reassigning its debt to a smaller group of taxpayers instead of spreading the cost nationwide. In essence, no tax dollars are being saved when they have already been spent.

Neither the local school system nor the state Department of Education can be faulted for taking advantage of a federal funding program that was guaranteed … at the time.

Again, whether this was a good program or a case of excessive federal spending is not the issue. That would be how schools and other publicly funded institutions proceed now that they they know a deal’s a deal until it isn’t.