The Carroll Board of Education cut $5.5 million yesterday from its operating budget request to the county, reneging on tentative contract agreements to give school employees a 3 percent pay raise.

Despite the cuts - required to bring the school system's spending plan in line with budget requirements of the county commissioners, who fund about 55 percent of the system's operating budget - the board proceeded with plans to spend about $2.6 million on new staff and programs.

To find additional money, board members also voted to charge high school athletes $60 per sport to play on extracurricular teams and to increase fees for organizations that rent school facilities. The changes brought the school system's operating budget to $206.9 million for the fiscal year that begins July 1 - an increase of $13.3 million, or 6.9 percent, over this year's spending.

The budget decisions - made over a two-hour work session that saw board members haggle over expenses as small as $10,000 for nursing stipends to as large as $788,280 for 16 new teachers to reduce class sizes in kindergarten through second grade - drew immediate complaints from union leaders.

"The really bad thing is that, for the first time, Carroll County officials have repudiated a bargained agreement and said, 'No, because we need more money we're going to take it from you,'" said Hal Fox, a representative of the Carroll County Education Association, the local teachers union, and the Carroll Association of School Employees, which represents secretaries, clerks, nurses and instructional aides.

Earlier in the afternoon, Fox told the board that choosing to not fund the tentative contract agreements was tantamount to "declaring war between the Board of Education ... and the employees who depend on the system to work the way it's supposed to. To this point, a contract has never been broken."

School board President Susan W. Krebs countered that the board has poured all of its new money into employee salaries for each of the past three years and that it was time to spend money on other priorities.

To that end, the board kept $2.3 million - and added $260,000 it had not previously discussed - to hire additional staff, including a testing coordinator, 36 teachers, five guidance counselors, two school nurses and five high school registrars. It also added about $224,000 for new summer school and intervention programs to support the tougher student promotion policy.

Board members cut $1.9 million in staff development, extended-enrichment program supplies, computers and principals' allocations for school supplies, emphasizing with each vote how difficult it was to cut anything.

Krebs also questioned union leaders' claims of low morale among teachers, pointing out that they have seen raises of 5 percent to 10 percent during the past three years.

Tentative agreements reached this spring with the unions representing about 2,800 school system employees would have raised salaries 3 percent for each of the next two years while requiring employees to pay more of ballooning health care costs.

The school board now must ask union leaders to renegotiate the contracts. If the unions refuse, negotiators would have to declare an impasse and forward the dispute to the state superintendent of schools for arbitration.

It is unlikely the unions would agree to the same concessions in benefits they made with the understanding that they would be receiving 3 percent raises.