Nelson Hernandez & John Wagner:

With Maryland facing a $2 billion budget shortfall next year, Gov. Martin O’Malley warned the chiefs of the state’s school systems Tuesday of hard times ahead, and the Senate president told them that they were “going to have to start taking a portion of the hit.”
Speaking in Annapolis to a gathering of the Public School Superintendents Association of Maryland, O’Malley (D) urged the heads of the county’s 24 school jurisdictions to find ways to save money but maintain the quality that earned the state a No. 1 ranking in a national survey by the Education Week trade newspaper.
O’Malley’s cost-saving suggestions included creating a school building design that could be used across the state, buying furniture from the state prison industry and installing solar panels on roofs to generate energy.
But he offered few specifics about what cuts the superintendents might expect in state funding even as he repeatedly stressed the challenge of chopping $2 billion from a $13 billion budget.