BAYSIDE GAZETTE
By Hunter Hine, Staff Writer
(Dec. 21, 2023) Maryland’s Interagency Commission on School Construction (IAC) didn’t allocate any state funding to Buckingham Elementary’s replacement project in the agency’s preliminary 2025 capital improvement plan budget, but this could change once the budget is finalized in May.
At a meeting over Zoom last Thursday, the IAC approved staff recommendations for preliminary allocations and planning approvals for the 75 percent authorization round of their 2025 capital improvement plan after hearing testimony from the leaders of several education agencies in Maryland.
Superintendent of Worcester County Schools Lou Taylor, State Sen. Mary Beth Carozza (R-38) and County Commissioner President Chip Bertino testified for Buckingham’s construction funding.
Worcester County schools requested a total of $3,566,500 in state funding for 2025, most of which was to pay for roof projects at Pocomoke and Snow Hill Middle Schools. Of that total, $513,000 was meant to go toward design services for the Buckingham replacement.
This preliminary IAC budget allocates only $1.9 million to the Snow Hill Middle School’s roof project. Buckingham design services and the Pocomoke roof project were marked for no state funding, for now.
The 75 percent allocation round is “very preliminary” and “incomplete,” maybe even more so than in past years, said Alex Donahue, executive director of the IAC. Last year the state funding target increased by several hundred million dollars between the 75 percent round and final budget approval, he said.
“We really have little idea at this point about the total amount of funding we’ll be working with,” Donahue said.
The IAC won’t know its complete budget until the General Assembly passes budget bills in the legislative session that begins in January, and IAC staff do expect a clearer picture of their funding by late that month, Donahue said.
The 90 percent budget authorization comes in March as the legislature winds up its business, and the final approval comes in May.
The IAC graded the Buckingham Elementary replacement project’s funding status as a “C,” which means “deferred and not currently eligible for planning or funding approval pending IAC review or unresolved [local education agency] issues, according to WCPS facilities manager Joe Price.
Between now and May, Buckingham and other projects with a C rating at this juncture could become eligible for state funding, said Arabia Davis, funding programs manager at the IAC.
Many of the projects received a C grade because of data-gathering challenges for variables of each project that the IAC uses to determine funding eligibility. One of the unknown variables holding back some C-rated projects is Pre-K enrollment, which has a new estimation procedure, Davis said.
“Getting to this set of preliminary recommendations has accordingly been challenging, and there are a significant number of projects that are not receiving allocations in this round that may very well receive funding recommendations in the upcoming 90 percent and 100 percent rounds,” Davis said.
In October, the IAC received 306 funding requests from all 24 of Maryland’s local education agencies and the Maryland School for the blind, which totaled $985 million. All the capital improvement project submissions include requests for planning approval, design services, design funding, construction funding and more, Davis said.
At this 75 percent phase of the IAC’s allocation process, staff have recommended funding just $210 million of the requests. IAC staff estimate that the full and final IAC budget, which will be approved in May, will be $280 million.
“This is a CIP record in terms of the scale of the requests and their complexity within the context of limited state resources,” Donahue said. “Just 10 weeks later, we are here to take a first cut at placing some expected state capital dollars on to those projects whose eligibility appears to be relatively clear.”
In January 2022, the IAC voted to freeze the amount of funding that the agency allocates to each local school system for 2024 and 2025 at the same amount of funding that each one received in 2023.
“This amount … is based upon the proportional 10-year average from FY 2013 to FY 2022 and other appropriate factors. This freeze prevents the use of other funding sources from impacting an LEA’s (local education agencies) 10-year average. This freeze also allows the IAC, LEAs, and stakeholders time to develop an appropriate methodology to develop future annual funding targets,” according to a 2022 memo about the funding freeze.
The funding freeze made Worcester County eligible for just 0.89 percent of the total IAC funding.
Montgomery County was locked in at the highest percentage of available funding, which was 14.75 percent. Most of the rest of the state’s local education agencies were set at funding proportions ranging from 0.68 percent to 6.45 percent. Baltimore City, Anne Arundel County and Baltimore County were set at around 9-12 percent of the total state budget.
At the meeting, Bertino said that Worcester County only received .37 percent, or $14.8 million, of the about $4 billion in school construction funds the state has distributed over the past decade.
“Approving this $5.8 million request for Buckingham Elementary School would increase this percentage to only one half of one percent — a small investment from the state that will reap incalculable dividends for the families of our community and the state as a whole,” Bertino said.
Worcester County would ask the state for about $5.8 million for the total replacement project. The county has preliminarily allocated $50 million for the Buckingham project in its 2025-2029 capital improvement plan, he said.
Carozza said that the funding request for Buckingham would comprise only 0.3 percent of Maryland’s total school construction funding dispersal.
“We are basing our appeal on facts, figures and fairness for our Buckingham Elementary students and community,” Carozza said.
Carozza also said that when the IAC previously decided not to fund Buckingham’s replacement, it based its decision on the determination that there were 641 seats available at Showell and Ocean City Elementary Schools. When the IAC funded Showell’s replacement a few years ago, Buckingham wasn’t considered an “adjacent school,” she said.
Donahue said that construction funding requests from all school systems are evaluated on the same formula that analyzes a school’s eligible enrollment as well as the capacity for students at that school and at nearby schools.
The IAC uses a state-rated capacity calculator that’s meant to keep funding equitable across different school systems, and the rules of this analysis haven’t changed for many years, Donahue said.
“What is different with this year as compared with past years in which previous projects were evaluated is that the IAC now has the capacity to fully implement these rules to a degree which they may not have been consistently implemented in previous years,” Donahue said.
Carozza also said that an idea floated by the IAC to combine Buckingham Elementary and Berlin Intermediate into one new building is not do-able.
Edward Kasemeyer, chairperson of the IAC, said that Donahue has a “more comprehensive concept” of the combined Buckingham and Berlin Intermediate building idea. Donahue plans to present the concept to Worcester County leaders in the future, Kasemeyer said.