Suspicious that school leaders are quietly expanding their bureaucracy, the Anne Arundel County Council has given them two weeks to explain how they scraped together $13.9 million to fund programs that county officials had previously rejected.
School officials are seeking approval for money they moved around to bolster performance pay and salary increases for a variety of jobs, hire student data record-keepers and help pay for a controversial $4.6 million personnel and payroll database and software system.
The school district also asked the council to increase the system's $869 million budget by $2.3 million to pay for climbing utility costs and the redesign of Annapolis High School.
Such requests before the council are routine and perfunctory under state law, which requires school officials to get County Council approval when shifting money between certain spending categories,
But this requirement is again churning trust and communication issues between the two bodies that, over the last few months, have waged an acrimonious battle over how money ought to be spent.
County officials have shown "a fundamental lack of understanding about what the schools need to operate," schools Superintendent Kevin M. Maxwell said yesterday, while county government officials have criticized the schools as being spendthrifts.
Council members are planning to meet with the district's top budget officials over the next two weeks. The council has scheduled a hearing for 7 p.m. Aug. 1.
On Monday night, the county's chief lobbyist, Alan R. Friedman, pressed council members to closely analyze the district's shifting allocations and listed six concerns over how they do not align with the county government's goal to prioritize investments that directly help academics.
For instance, Friedman told the council that hiring high school registrars in lieu of using six student workers as part of a program that helps curb truancy and dropout rates creates another layer of staffing "in a system overrun with bureaucracy."
Maxwell said the registrars are school-based employees who would be hired to reduce the workloads of guidance counselors, who are so burdened by record keeping that they don't have enough time to counsel students about colleges and emotional health.
"Why [county officials] choose to go into a County Council meeting and read a bunch of questions into the public record without ever coming to talk to me is what's a big concern for me," Maxwell said. "It's unclear to the school system why what have been rather routine practices are suddenly being subjected to hearings and questioning."
Last month, the school system had another tug-of-war with the County Council over an $18.9 million budget transfer that fell $3.7 million short of the schools' request and left unfunded key initiatives to train prospective school administrators.
"In the longer term here, the school board and county council and county executive need to establish some mutual respect for each other's roles and responsibilities," Maxwell said.
County Executive John R. Leopold yesterday sent a letter urging the county council to deny the school's request for $2.3 million to cover higher utility costs, saying, "I believe the Board of Education has failed to take advantage of opportunities to reduce these expenses."
County officials also accused the district of padding administrative salaries, even as school officials disputed their numbers and interpretation.
"The board's action [to increase step and longevity pay by $2.5 million] increases the pool of funding for administrative salary increases by over 12 percent," Friedman told the council. "This administration and council have made classroom service a top priority and the board's action is inconsistent with this."
County government officials also want to know why the district is using its entire $3.9 million surplus from health care to help pay for a personnel and payroll database system.
Leopold's staff had asked the district to wait to purchase the database system while it researched whether the county could share it and save money.
The district, however, moved to buy the system immediately, saying it needs to replace aging human resources software and hardware that could suddenly crash and derail the payroll for thousands of employees.
ruma.kumar@baltsun.com