Howard County Public Schools superintendent shares priorities ahead of return to school

In just two weeks, on Aug. 24, students in Howard County will return to the classroom.

CBS News Baltimore spoke with Howard County Public Schools Superintendent Bill Barnes about what's new this school year and how he plans to address some of the school system's biggest challenges.  

In his third year on the job, Barnes told WJZ there is still work to do to improve educational services for the district's more than 57,000 students.

"Our top priorities really continue to be making sure that every child can read by Grade 3. We want to make sure that our students are on grade level in mathematics by the end of Grade 8; and we want to make sure that every one of our children is college and career ready and life ready by the end of tenth grade," he said.

As he leads the county's 78 schools, Barnes said he is particularly focused on expanding support for special education students, who make up a little more than 12% of the student population.

In August 2025, WJZ reported that a Maryland Office of the Inspector General for Education investigation found two classes at a Howard County special education school were not being taught by a certified teacher.

This school year, paraeducators will transition into new roles.

"We have a little more than 100 elementary paraeducators that will be retrained and repurposed to support students in elementary school, but specifically, those students with disabilities who receive special education services, and specifically students who receive language services," Barnes said.

In 2025, the Board of Education cut more than 100 positions as the district worked to balance its budget.

Barnes acknowledged that staffing remains a challenge.

"There are particular subject areas, it'll be more difficult to hire. I'm sure when I get my next staffing briefing, we'll see that we still need to hire special educators, we still need to hire probably [for] our upper-level science elective courses," Barnes said.

We also asked Barnes what the school district is doing to improve school safety.

In July, WJZ reported that a 15-year-old student from Columbia was charged after police said he was caught with a gun at school.

The month before, additional security precautions were put in place after two schools received multiple online threats.

"We have a close relationship with our Howard County Police Department; and we coordinate services through our school resource officers, which are police department employees, and we supplement those with security assistants to the high school level and school support and safety liaisons at the middle school level. We'll have half of our middle school served by those new positions based on this year's budget," Barnes said.

Howard County Public Schools employs more than 4,600 teachers. We also asked Barnes what he is doing to improve staff morale.

He acknowledged that teacher workloads remain challenging and said the goal for him and his team is to determine what they can take off teachers' plates.

"We need to figure out what we can take off of teachers' plates, what we can streamline, what we can eliminate, what we can make easier so that they can focus on what they went into education to do, which is to teach and support students," Barnes said.