In the name of equity, some Montgomery County schools get more money. How is it spent?

An elementary school launched a “breakfast club” for children who fell behind in math. A middle school offset the cost of field trips so students could visit the interactive KID Museum. And a high school purchased noise-cancelling headphones for teenagers with sensory issues.

This was possible, school leaders said, because Montgomery County Public Schools launched a new budgeting tool that allocates extra money for campuses based on the composition of their student bodies.

The so-called “equity add-on” provides an additional $20 for each student who has a disability, is learning English or comes from a low-income family.

“We wanted to make sure that we provided differentiated resources to support our students with higher needs, either directly or indirectly,” Carly Thompson, director of the district’s Division of Financial Management, told school board members on Monday.

During a briefing on the initiative’s first year of implementation, board members learned that it accounted for about $2.5 million of the district’s roughly $3.6 billion budget in fiscal year 2026.

Superintendent Thomas Taylor had pushed for a larger chunk of money but couldn’t get it given the district’s strained finances.

As officials consider the future of this budget initiative, they will look for returns on investment and debate whether to strengthen spending guidelines.

“We also feel it’s important to allow principal autonomy and how they utilize the funds to meet the needs of their specific school,” Thompson said.

How it works

Historically, each school in MCPS has received a base amount of funding — determined by total student enrollment — to pay for instructional materials, textbooks and other learning tools.

But some school communities — with wealthier parents — were able to fundraise significant sums each year to supplement that amount.

The equity add-on was one way the district tried to make up for the money that families in lower-income communities could not hope to raise.

Consider Burtonsville and Wyngate elementary schools — two similarly sized campuses with vastly different demographics.

Without the equity add-on, Burtonsville Elementary’s base allocation would have been about $54,000 while Wyngate’s would have been roughly $55,000.

But Burtonsville served nearly 15 times as many low-income students as Wyngate. It also had more than double the number of students with disabilities and students learning English.

Factoring in the equity add-on, Burtonsville ended up with a nearly $66,000 allocation, while Wyngate’s sat at roughly $59,000.

Districtwide, the funds have been spent on things like learning intervention tools, adaptive communication devices and class credit recovery programs, according to a spring survey of campus leaders.

“The equity add-on funds have helped our students that have sensory needs be able to be more comfortable in the larger school and classroom environment by purchasing the noise cancelling headphones and sensory items,” one high school official wrote in the survey.

District officials had hoped to increase the add-on to $30 in fiscal year 2027, but were unsuccessful amid difficult financial constraints.

“When we have new initiatives like this, we do kind of have to see how it goes a little bit, and then we can kind of fine-tune things,” board member Rita Montoya said. “That’s where we’re at right now.”