Published on: Thursday, February 02, 2012

By Cara Hedgepeth

Chief Financial Officer for Prince George’s County Public Schools, Matt Stanski, thanked parents, teachers, students and community members for their excellent questions last Wednesday night during the third and final Prince George’s County Board of Education budget forum. He even called the meeting at Cora L. Rice Elementary School the best one yet.

In his address to the group, Stanski emphasized the transparency of the school board’s budget, which is using a new system called Student Based Budgeting to fund schools. The budget is available online and forums were scheduled to keep members of the community involved and informed about the changes to the budgeting system.

Several parents were relieved to hear that programs like instrumental music and crisis groups at the elementary and middle school level are locked, meaning the central office will still allocate funds for those programs ensuring that they’re available to every student at every school.

“The committee felt they were important,” Stanski said.

But for Linda Lagr, it’s not enough.

Langr is a media specialist at High Point High School. In fact, she’s the only media specialist at High Point High School. And under the Student Based Budgeting model, which allocates funds based on the needs of students in a particular school, her full-time position will be reduced even further.

Student Based Budgeting funds one part-time media specialist to every school in the county — no matter the grade level or size. Langr said one half-time specialist is inadequate, especially at the high school level where students are attempting to prepare for college and depend heavily on library resources.

The cut is also a particularly devastating one for high schools since just two years ago the budget forced the board to cut the media specialist position from two full-time people to one.

“I feel like I need two of me,” Langr said.

Armed with a stack of literature on the importance of school libraries, Langr was one of three media specialists at the forum. She said this was the second forum she had been to, on top of writing to local legislators. Curry Rose Hoskey, a media specialist at three Prince George’s County elementary schools, called Langr the media specialists’ “foremost advocacy expert.”

Hoskey and Langr want one full-time media person in every school to ensure the library can be open to students for the majority of the day.

“When you don’t have increased access to books … the culture of literacy declines,” said Hoskey.

Langr added that many students don’t have access to transportation to get them to public libraries and depend on the school library to be open after school.

“They say they want to fund and meet the needs of the students, but not having a full-time media specialist is not funding our kids,” Hoskey said.

But Stanski reinforced that the Student Based Budgeting model allows for flexibility and the ability for principals to use their discretionary funds to structure their schools as they see fit. He told those at the meeting that although a half-time media specialist is assigned by the county, a school has the freedom to hire that person full time.

Despite the reassurance from Stanski, Langr and Hoskey remain unconvinced. With a limited number of dollars and a seemingly unlimited number of needs, Hoskey said she is interested to know how many schools already operating under the Student Based Budgeting model have chosen to hire full-time media specialists.

Langr said she plans on attending the upcoming hearings in February as the board moves forward with the budget.

“I’m going to keep speaking out,” she said.