BALTIMORE — A state Senate committee voted Friday to stick to Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s four-year pause on teacher collaborative time and maintain funding increases for community schools under the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, diverging in policy from the House.

“If this is ultimately going to succeed and we are going to lift up every child, that’s the place where that’s going to happen,” Senate Budget and Taxation Committee Chair Guy Guzzone, a Howard County Democrat, said of community school funding after the voting session. “I’m not saying there won’t be a time when we have to deal with scaling that back, pacing it in a different way, but I think we can hold for right now on that.”

The Senate Budget and Taxation Committee voted on amendments to Moore’s Excellence in Maryland Public Schools Act Friday morning, splitting policy proposed by the governor and the House, which has already passed the bill, down the middle.

Moore’s bill to alter the state’s landmark Blueprint for Maryland’s Future education reform policy, which he testified in favor of in 2020, originally proposed a two-year delay in funding increases for schools that receive Concentration of Poverty Grants or community schools and would have paused the implementation of teacher collaborative time for four years.

Earlier this month, the House chamber voted to restore the funding increases for community schools and shorten the pause on collaborative time from four years to one.

Guzzone, who offered the amendments to the bill Friday, said he prefers the term “pacing” over “pause.”

Sen. J.B. Jennings, a Baltimore County Republican who sits on the Budget and Taxation Committee, said that, while they provided more cuts than the House, he doesn’t think it’s enough to “get us out of the perils we’re facing right now.”

In an interview with The Baltimore Sun, Jennings praised Moore for the cuts he proposed in the bill’s original language.

“He was willing to do what others weren’t,” Jennings said. “The third rail of politics is education. No one wants to cut from it, but we’re always adding more and more and more to education funding-wise, and we have to slow it down some.”

In restoring the four-year delay in collaborative time implementation, the newly amended bill would reduce the amount of foundation spending per pupil because funding tied to collaborative time is baked into that formula. If passed, this per pupil decrease would not impact spending for special education, English learners or students most at risk of not succeeding academically, as well as those who attend the Maryland School for the Deaf, the Maryland School for the Blind or the SEED School of Maryland.

Sen. Karen Lewis Young, a Frederick County Democrat, asked if committee staff knew the financial impact that the lowered spending per pupil would have on local boards of education. The answer was not immediately available.

“Thank you,” Lewis Young sighed.

The amended bill would also lower the funding increases that the Maryland Consortium on Coordinated Community Supports, which provides mental health and wraparound services to students, to cap at $100 million annually.

The reduction in compensatory spending would save $30 million each year.

Additionally, under amendments to Moore’s bill adopted by the Senate committee, funding increases would freeze if December’s revenue projections from the Maryland Board of Revenue Estimates decrease by $850 million or if federal funds decrease by $712 million, respectively. A combined decrease in revenue projections and federal funding that flows into the state equal to at least $1.2 billion would also trigger a freeze in funding increases.

The education policy aspects of the bill need to be amended by the Senate Education, Energy and the Environment Committee before the bill can be debated by the full chamber.

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