State Short-Changed Montgomery Schools

County and school district officials said they suspected the wealth estimate was high and urged state officials to recalculate the numbers last January.

"We've got it well documented through e-mails and stuff that we started asking a lot of questions," Firestine said.

Weast said his staff was "utterly shocked" by the state calculations and "tried to seek out explanations." School officials had projected a much larger increase in state aid.

"Did they rerun the formula? Did they check the numbers? Somebody got it wrong," Weast said.

The numbers stood until August, when the taxation agency notified other government agencies it had discovered the error. The overestimation of Montgomery's property wealth became clear when tax revenues came in below projections.

"We had some bad information," said John Sullivan, director of the state agency. "I don't know exactly what caused it. We had a change here in my assistant who does the base estimates" of each county's property values.

O'Malley said his staff eventually determined that Montgomery schools were owed money and that other school systems had been overpaid. He said no school system has been contacted because the glitch harmed only Montgomery. It would be difficult, he said, to recoup money from any of the school systems that were overpaid. The overpayments totaled about $7 million, he said.

Firestine said he can't fault the state "in terms of saying there was some coverup, because probably nobody connected the dots." But he said he does fault state officials for not discovering the mistake months earlier, when officials on his and Weast's staffs were urging state agencies to check their math.

"They should have gone back and re-audited their figures," Firestine said. "Somebody should have said, 'That doesn't make sense.' "

Weast said his staff discovered the mistake when reviewing a Dec. 22 memo from the Maryland State Department of Education to all superintendents, offering preliminary calculations for state aid in the next fiscal year. Although the memo made no mention of an accounting error, it showed Montgomery schools reaping three-quarters of all new state revenue for the coming year. The document made clear that the previous year's math had been faulty, Weast said.