It’s a pivotal week for Prince George’s County Public Schools interim superintendent Shawn Joseph, who is giving his State of the Schools Address on Tuesday evening at Suitland High School ahead of a budget release later this week.
In an interview with WTOP, he described a school system making progress but in need of more investment to help reach its goals. He also warned the decisions made in the coming months could reverberate into the future.
During his speech Tuesday night, Joseph said he intends to talk about the need to improve “acceleration” of students in the county.
“There’s promise in Prince George’s County,” Joseph said. “This isn’t a story of mass remediation. We’ve got to figure out … how to accelerate because, like I’ve communicated in previous interviews, 40% of our students are immigrant students.”
Joseph attributed the high number of English learners to the lower levels of proficiency county students achieve compared with the state average, to go with lower SAT scores.
“We take tests that are English based, and so with our standards being so high … we’re going to always have some challenges.”
His push for acceleration also comes as he gets ready to unveil a new budget proposal this week.
Joseph said the school system has found $150 million in savings and reductions. But he’s also asking the county council to provide an additional $50 million in funding this year to help push students forward.
“In my $50 million request, $30 million of that $50 million is for special education services,” he told WTOP. “It’s been a challenge for us. We’re in corrective action, and the $30 million will help us strengthen special education services.”
According to Joseph, “The other dollars are going to go for safety and security, focusing on AI literacy, focusing on professional development for our teachers and staff, really refining strategies and investing in programs that will strengthen reading and math performance, and continuing to be able to give our employees the raises that they negotiated.”
Prince George’s County Council Chair Krystal Oriadha told WTOP she’s interested in supporting those aspects of the budget, but stopped short of saying the money would be there.
The school system is in a bigger financial pinch after the county began getting credit for revenue generated for the school system by a tax on phone lines, Joseph said. By crediting the county with the funding, it effectively reduced the amount of money from the general fund the county had to give the school system under state law.
But it also passed at a time when the state was promising to boost spending on education.
“We need targeted investment,” said Joseph, who also argued that the idea that 60% of the county’s budget is education isn’t quite accurate. He said the reality is only about 20% of the money spent by the county goes to education, with state and federal funding picking up the rest.
Joseph said other nearby school systems get higher contributions from the counties they’re in. Despite a decrease in the number of immigrant students in county schools this year, he said enrollment is fairly flat from last year.
“We’ve got to have the honest conversation about, ‘How do we demonstrate that we value education?’” Joseph said.
“If we are in another situation next year where we don’t want to have a $100 million ask, it will require us cutting people,” he warned. “I call this a reset year. This is a year with a stabilization budget. We need a long-term fix for costs within the system.”