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“Nobody goes into education to become rich, but we deserve what was guaranteed to us,” Cindy Sexton, president of the Teacher’s Association of Baltimore County (TABCO), told Truthout. After months of renegotiations regarding a pay-raise deal for teachers for the 2025-2026 school year, in mid-July, both TABCO and the school district reached an agreement that grants teachers less than they’d bargained for.

The initial pay raise deal was part of a three-year negotiated agreement with the Baltimore County school system last year, which would have increased teachers’ compensation by 14 percent by the 2026-2027 school year. Educators called it a monumental move that not only saved teachers unions from the bargaining table but also ensured incremental pay increases that would be accounted for in each year’s budget. “Negotiations are hugely time-consuming, and we wanted a new system where we could all count on our pay and they could focus on the budget it was going to cost them — it was widely touted and celebrated,” Sexton said.

And while year one of this deal proved successful, by November 2024, both federal and state funding cuts prompted the Baltimore County school district to ask unions back to the negotiating table, despite their raises already having been approved just the year before.

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“The initial agreement was halted despite the district already negotiating with the county executive according to our contract,” Sexton said. “While we still met with the district about non-monetary things that they could do to help our workload, there was no movement. In February of this year, Baltimore County Executive [Kathy] Klausmeier finally told the district how much money they could count on, and it was far less than what they needed to fund this agreement.”

In fact, despite Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS) requesting a 10.4 percent increase to their overall budget for the 2025-2026 school year, Klausmeier’s finalized budget in April only accounted for a 3.5 percent increase, leaving a gap of $61 million for the teacher’s raises. Now, the 5 percent teacher’s pay raise anticipated in the last year was being renegotiated to as low as 1.5 percent. “This is the first time that any of us can remember [that] the school system has not gotten the funding it needed from the county executive,” Sexton told Truthout.

And despite TABCO and other teachers’ unions recognizing the three-year agreement as a fixed contract, Sexton says she believes the school district relied on flexible language in the agreement which outlined that renegotiations would happen in the case of underfunding to re-budget the pay raise deal whenever they saw fit. “It just does not appear that [the agreement] was bargained in good faith,” she said. “It appears like [BCPS] knew from the beginning that they were going to go back to the language that said, ‘If the funding doesn’t happen you........

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