St. Mary’s County Public Schools laid out a six-year, roughly $160 million state-funding request Tuesday for roof and HVAC replacements — and told county commissioners the math doesn’t currently add up.
Board of Education capital planning staff told commissioners the state’s own facility assessments call for 16 roof replacements and 15 HVAC replacements across the district within six years, based on end-of-life projections. The state’s approved cost-per-square-foot for school construction has jumped from $302 in 2018 to $448 today, a rise staff attributed largely to tariffs — a 4-6% increase tied to Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum, copper and lumber, and a roughly 10-12.5% duty under Section 301 on other imports — on top of ordinary labor and material inflation. Statewide, recent school construction and renovation bids have come in tens of millions of dollars over their original state-approved estimates.
Against that need, the state has capped St. Mary’s traditional capital funding allocation at $4.8 million a year, down from $5 million. “We need to let the state know that we need to be doing four schools a year and that they need to come up with the money,” said Kim Howell, the Board of Education’s capital planning lead, “because this is the need.” A separate state priority fund intended to direct $70 million toward the neediest districts sent $60 million of that to seven counties this year, leaving St. Mary’s and 16 other counties to compete for the remaining $1 million.
Commissioner Mike Hewitt voted to abstain on approving the six-year plan for submission to the state, saying he didn’t believe the funding would materialize and worried the county would be left to cover the gap. The current fiscal year’s request — $9.2 million to finish the Chopticon High School and Esperanza Middle School projects plus two planning studies — passed 3-0 with the abstention. Projected costs climb sharply in later years, reaching an estimated $21-22 million annually by FY31-33 as more roofs and HVAC systems reach the end of their lifespan simultaneously.
Commissioners also pressed staff on a separate issue raised during the presentation: declining enrollment even as the county’s population grows. Staff said the disconnect is driven by new housing skewing toward higher price points that don’t draw large families, longer tenure in “starter” homes as property values rise, and falling birth rates — not overcrowding, which staff said is not currently a problem districtwide despite social media claims to the contrary.
