Baltimore City schools pay tops $100K for 34% of employees

Baltimore City Public Schools now pays at least $100,000 a year to 4,400 employees, or 34% of its workforce, a jump from 19% two years earlier. The district had 12,836 employees in 2025, and 56 of them earned $200,000 or more, a payroll surge that lands squarely in the middle of Baltimore’s long-running debate over whether more spending is reaching classrooms.

The numbers are especially stark because City Schools has also been under pressure to show academic gains. The district remains the lowest-performing system in Maryland, and nearly half of city students were chronically absent in early 2025. Of the city’s 148 rated schools, 65% earned one- or two-star ratings on the Maryland Report Card, the state’s lowest band.

Baltimore City Public Schools’ own board approved a $1.9 billion FY26 operating budget on May 14, 2025, saying it was meant to sustain progress and student success and included salary increases for teachers and staff. In December 2024, the district also approved a new two-year agreement with the Baltimore Teachers Union that raised teacher compensation, created a new career ladder and pushed minimum starting salaries higher several years ahead of the state requirement.

That spending comes with a measurable but still limited academic payoff. City Schools reported a four-year graduation rate of 71% for the 2023-2024 school year, its highest since 2019. But Maryland’s accountability system weighs much more than graduation alone, including academic achievement, growth, chronic absenteeism and access to a well-rounded curriculum, and Baltimore still struggles on several of those fronts.

For parents and taxpayers, the central question is simple: which raises were tied to classroom results, and what return has the city gotten for them? Evie Harris, a Baltimore City Public Schools graduate and Army veteran, said the salary figures stirred anger and reflected a system more focused on funding than learning. Harris said she pulled her daughter out of a city elementary school about nine years ago after a math-class assignment asked students to write a letter to the governor seeking a raise for the teachers’ union.

City Schools says its budget priorities include literacy and math instruction, college and career readiness, attendance and dropout re-engagement, mental health supports, arts funding, summer learning and services for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. But with six-figure pay now reaching more than a third of the workforce, Baltimore residents are left weighing a simple test of accountability: whether the money is changing what students can do in class, not just what adults earn in paychecks.