The contest for an at-large seat on the Montgomery County Board of Education this year gained two late entries just ahead of Wednesday night’s filing deadline, leaving incumbent board member Phil Kauffman of Olney with the task of fending off four challengers in his bid for a third term this year.
Gwendolyn Love Kimbrough, a long-time Chevy Chase resident who was once executive assistant to the superintendent of the Washington, D.C., schools, completed the filing process for the seat late Tuesday. And Michael Ibanez of Montgomery Village, a former teacher who unsuccessfully ran for the school board in 2010, filed for the seat Wednesday.
Kimbrough and Ibanez join two previously announced candidates—Jeanette Dixon of Silver Spring, a retired principal, and Sebastian Johnson of Takoma Park, a former student member of the Board of Education—in challenging Kauffman, a retired government attorney, in the nonpartisan election. A first round of voting will take place April 26, the same day as this year’s party primaries. The two top vote-getters for the seat will then face off in the November general election.
In contrast to the crowded at-large race, it appeared until late Wednesday that the Gaithersburg/Rockville-based District 2 seat and the Silver Spring/Takoma Park-based District 4 opening on the school board would go uncontested this year.
But incumbent Rebecca Smondrowski of Gaithersburg, seeking a second term in District 2, picked up an opponent shortly before the filing deadline: Brandon Rippeon of Bethesda, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for Congress in District 6 in 2012. In District 4, Shebra Evans—who narrowly lost a bid for the school board’s other at-large seat in 2014—was the only candidate to succeed retiring board member Chris Barclay until barely an hour prior to the deadline. Anjali Reed Phukan, who ran for state comptroller as a write-in candidate in 2014, then filed to give Evans an opponent.
Meanwhile, the crowded field for the Democratic nomination for Congress in Montgomery County-based District 8, which expanded to eight last week with the entry of Total Wine & More co-owner David Trone of Potomac, now stands at nine candidates. Dan Bolling, a Bethesda resident and long-time biotech company official, filed for the seat being vacated by Rep. Chris Van Hollen—who is running for Senate—just hours before the deadline.
Bolling, who currently serves on the Montgomery County Commission on Veterans Affairs, lost a bid for the Democratic nomination in an Indiana congressional district in 2012. Besides Bolling and Trone, the District 8 Democratic contest includes state Sen. Jamie Raskin of Takoma Park, former Marriott International executive Kathleen Matthews of Chevy Chase, state Dels. Kumar Barve of Rockville and Ana Sol Gutierrez of Chevy Chase, former Obama administration officials Will Jawando of Silver Spring and Joel Rubin of Chevy Chase, and David Anderson of Potomac, an official of a Washington-based seminar and internship program.
The 74-year old Kimbrough, who more than four decades ago worked on a report for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that examined the correlation between the racial composition of schools and the financial resources allotted to them, in recent years earned a doctorate in developmental psychology at Howard University. In addition to several posts in the D.C. government, she has owned and operated a firm that provided physical therapy services.
She encountered controversy more than a decade ago, when she was director of a charter school founded in 2000 as part of a D.C.-based residential treatment facility that she established for emotionally disturbed students. According to a report in The Washington Post at the time, the charter school failed to meet enrollment projections and ran into financial trouble; Kimbrough became involved in a running battle with D.C. school board members who questioned some of the payments being made by the school for rent and services.
Kimbrough asserted Wednesday that the causes of the charter school’s problems were “absolutely political, unadulteratedly political,” while adding, “often, when you’re doing something that is different from what has typically been done, you will sometimes jeopardize power bases that have been long established [and] you can run into political problems.”
Kimbrough, who has grown children who attended Montgomery County public schools, said “one of the major issues facing not only this school system, but systems throughout the country, is the inability to maximize the positive components of diversity.”
Referring to the teaching staff of what is now a majority-minority school population in the county, Kimbrough said, “We fail to see…the need for [a teacher] to be totally familiar with the cultural differences that exist among that group of youngsters, and work with those differences so that they are a plus for everybody sitting in that classroom. I think we’re afraid to address it because it doesn’t come with a pat solution.”
She added, “…All teachers have to become experts in diversity—black teachers, Hispanic teachers, Asian teachers, white teachers.”
While Kimbrough declined to state a position on whether former schools Superintendent Joshua Starr, whose contract was not renewed by the school board a year ago, should have been retained, Ibanez said he agreed with the decision to let Starr go. “He had his sights set on other things bigger than the county that I think detracted from his focus on county schools,” said Ibanez, 56, who has spent a quarter of a century as a teacher and administrator—including four years teaching in the Montgomery County school system. The school board is set to conditionally appoint a new superintendent Thursday night.
Ibanez indicated a large part of the reason for his 11th hour candidacy was the composition of his field of opponents. “My reason for running is that I looked at who is running—and we don’t need an attorney, we don’t need another retired principal,” he declared, referring to Kauffman and Dixon. There are currently two retired principals on the board, neither of whom are up for re-election this year: District 1 member Judith Docca, who defeated Ibanez by a 70-30 percent margin in 2010, and District 5 member Michael Durso.
Of the 27-year old Johnson, Ibanez said, “He’s got an impressive resume, but I think that, like many previous board of ed members, he sees this position as a stepping stone. If he does get elected, it’s on to the next elected office for him.”
This year’s school board candidates are scheduled to appear at a Feb. 29 forum at the Board of Education offices—the Carver Educational Services Center in Rockville—sponsored by the League of Women Voters and the Montgomery County Council of PTAs. In addition, Dixon has announced a series of nine community forums to give voters an opportunity to learn more about her views. The first of these sessions will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. Feb. 11 in the cafeteria of Bethesda’s Walter Johnson High School, where Dixon once served as an assistant principal.