Yesterday’s Montgomery County Public School (MCPS) budget vote should concern every family in Rockville and throughout Montgomery County. As a Rockville City Councilmember, I feel compelled to speak out because these decisions directly affect our students, families, teachers, and school communities in Rockville and across Montgomery County.

First, the County Council continues to treat school infrastructure as something that can be delayed, shifted, or sacrificed... and this directly concerns families in Rockville.

To help close MCPS’s operating budget gap, the County Council adopted a proposal from Councilmember Will Jawando to move $36 million from the County’s six-year Capital Improvements Program into MCPS operating expenses. Such decisions can reduce the number of operating cuts in the short term, but it comes at a real cost: delayed necessary school construction projects and another message to families that long-term school infrastructure can wait. As I recently told WUSA 9... ensuring the health and safety of our children cannot wait.

The consequences of refusing to prioritize necessary school construction projects are real. Wootton High School is now proposed for closure directly because of delayed funding. And the necessary-for-safety renovations for schools such as Twinbrook Elementary School and Magruder High School are gone after previously being included. These are not abstract budget decisions. They are decisions about whether community schools will exist and whether students learn in safe, modern, and appropriate school buildings.

Importantly, as I recently told Bethesda Magazine, we should not solve this problem by raising taxes. Instead, Montgomery County should be aggressively pursuing responsible funding tools that do not increase taxes, such as public-private partnerships, better long-term capital planning, state and federal infrastructure opportunities, and more strategic use of existing resources.

Second, this budget fails to sufficiently prioritize school safety staffing.

MCPS’s original recommended operating budget included funding for additional school-based security staffing. The final budget protects baseline security staffing, but it does not move forward with the additional safety positions that were supposed to strengthen school safety and we STILL have not brought back School Resource Officers in Montgomery County.

After what our community experienced at Wootton High School earlier this year, school safety cannot be treated as optional. Additional security staffing, secure facilities, emergency systems, fire safety, HVAC, roofs, cameras, and safe building conditions are all part of necessary student safety.

We should not be balancing budgets by pushing school safety and school infrastructure further down the road. For too long, MCPS, the Board of Education, the County Executive, and the County Council have passed responsibility back and forth while school communities are left fighting for basic repairs, renovations, and safety investments. This. Must. Stop.

Our students deserve safe schools. Our teachers and staff deserve safe workplaces. And Montgomery County needs a serious, transparent, long-term plan to fund school infrastructure and school safety without forcing communities to fight each other every budget cycle.