At-large school board member Karla Silvestre faces off against unknown newcomer Mike Erickson

Challenger has not attended election forums and his positions on issues are largely unknown

October 18, 2022 7:06 p.m.

Editor’s note: Bethesda Beat is running a series of profiles on candidates for the Montgomery County Board of Education. Today’s profiles focus on at-large incumbent Karla Silvestre and challenger Mike Erickson. All candidates were asked the same questions. Some answers were shortened for length and clarity. This story was edited at 8:50 a.m. Oct. 19 to place the candidates in alphabetical order.

An incumbent and a somewhat unknown newcomer – both Montgomery County Public Schools parents – are running for the at-large seat in the nonpartisan Board of Education race in the Nov. 8 general election.

Karla Silvestre, who has served on the board since 2019, is 50 and lives in Silver Spring. She has one daughter who is a high school sophomore and another who is a graduate of the school system.

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Mike Erickson is 48 and lives in Derwood. He is a graduate of MCPS and has two children who are MCPS students.

This is Erickson’s first interview with news media about his campaign. He came in second place to Silvestre, earning 17% of the vote compared to Silvestre’s nearly 56%, in the July 19 primary despite doing little campaigning after filing for the seat in the spring. The top two primary finishers compete in the general election.

Erickson doesn’t seem to have an active campaign website or materials and did not respond to Bethesda Beat’s candidate questionnaire for its voters guide. He did participate in the voters guide published by the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County but has not participated in forums or interviews and his positions have largely been unknown. He was originally listed as a panelist at the League of Women Voters school board candidate forum Thursday night, but he did not attend.

Mike Erickson

Who are you, what do you do, and why are you running?

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I am a lifelong resident of Montgomery County. I went to school all the way through MCPS and I went to the University of Maryland. I’m a father of two and I’ve been a small business owner for 21 years in Montgomery County.

The thing that really got me wanting to get involved was the reaction to the COVID situation. I didn’t like the fact that the kids were taken out of school for so long and the distance learning wasn’t doing my kids any favors. Other parents I know were saying the same thing. We’d go to school board meetings and felt like we were being treated horribly by the current members of the board. So I decided to give it a shot and run.

What are your thoughts on financial equity in MCPS and making sure all schools have equal resources?

We live in a very wealthy county and pay a lot of taxes. No school should be a failing mess, but I’m hearing from other parents that they’re pulling their kids out for homeschooling or private schools because they had a bad experience. I want to restore Montgomery County schools to what they used to be when I grew up here, something to be proud of. Nationally, people would talk about how great our schools were and people would come from all over the country to be a part of these schools. 

I don’t want for just the “haves” to have everything. I want to definitely make sure everybody has an equal chance everywhere. For schools where a larger percentage of the students don’t pursue college, I want us to strengthen vocational opportunities, trade schools and things like that. I want to give students opportunities to try out a career while they’re still in high school and pursue passions, like art or whatever it may be if they don’t want to be on a college track.

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How can the school system make up for loss of learning during the pandemic?

I feel the damage is done for a segment of the student population. There are some years they’ll never get back because of the decisions that the school board made. So that’s a good question I need to look into to see if there’s anything we can do to get students back on course, or as close as possible. We need the schools to be more rigorous in general. We might be able to do programs after school or even maybe a virtual school. But there should be a balance. You can’t just keep the students nonstop. They have to be kids.

What would you like to see done to improve student mental health support and services?

I go to the school board meetings and I see these testimonials from students seeming emotionally wrecked, and a lot of it is because of the COVID decision and scaring children to death thinking they’re gonna die. Truth needs to be told to these kids that it was a political move.

What are your thoughts on implementing protections for LGBTQ students in MCPS?

I don’t think it should be specific to any group of kids. Safety is safety and protection is protection. Bullying anybody for any reason is not acceptable. And if you’re distracting someone’s time for learning and studying, you should be punished and dealt with. I don’t see any special reason because of the gender or sexual orientation. Bullying is just not acceptable.

How do you view the school’s efforts at recruiting teachers during the labor shortage?

It’s bad. The teachers are asking for help and the class sizes are too big. We spend so much in taxes in Montgomery County and I know the school system got tens of millions of dollars for COVID relief. We should be paying our teachers to be competitive with all the private schools around here. They should be wanting to come to MCPS schools, instead of going the other direction. I’m for higher teacher pay based on the quality of teaching. If there are teachers that don’t deserve it or are letting their students down, then they actually need to be replaced.

What do you personally see as the top issues affecting the school system, and what do you want to do to make change or support existing policies?

To start off with, I want every student to be constitutionally literate, knowing the constitutional rights, their God-given rights that the government or anybody cannot take from them. Maybe we could have a short class on it for proficiency in the Constitution so that our kids have a good foundation for being citizens and knowing what their rights are.

I want Common Core to end. I think it’s done a lot of damage to our students and even the teachers.

Obviously, no more mandates or all this fear pushed on our children. It seems it was way overkill. And looking back, I think I was right. So I never want to see that happen again.

Also, I want to see more parent involvement from people like me that are just regular people with jobs with families, but also with concerns for our kids. I’d like to see everybody stand up and do their duty, whether it’s running for something, or assisting somebody who’s running, or just getting involved. We need to do more than just turning it over to other people and letting them make all the decisions. Even when you’re not happy with the decision, you have no one to blame but yourself. If anything, if I can be an example for someone who will do that, that’s great.

Karla Silvestre

Who are you, what do you do, and why are you running?

First and foremost, I have two girls, one a graduate of our school system and the other is currently a 10th grader. I work at Montgomery College and I’m director of community engagement there. I worked for the county government previously, and I really got to know Montgomery County really well. I have a master’s degree in teaching English as a second language and a bachelor’s degree in biology and have done work in STEM education in the past, and I’m originally from Guatemala. So I am fully bilingual and can represent the immigrant experience on the Board of Education.

Four years ago, I decided to run because there was no representation of the Latino and Hispanic community on the board, nor had there been any in the previous 10 years. [Montgomery County Public Schools] is 33% Latino, Hispanic, so it was just a huge lack of representation and we know representation matters. I had been volunteering for the school system and worked on committees and task forces. I felt I had a lot to contribute. But as a single resident of the county, it’s hard to get the school system’s attention on the things that you think can be done to improve the school system. So I said, well, where are these decisions being made? How can I have a bigger impact? And then that’s where I started to run for the Board of Education. And now this time around, I want to have a normal term that’s not all about crisis management [related to the COVID-19 pandemic]. And yes, that is part of the job. But I have priorities and ideas that I still want to implement hopefully, if I’m reelected again.

What are your thoughts on financial equity in MCPS and making sure all schools have equal resources?

The school system funds higher-needs schools with more resources. So [a] Title One [school] gets more teachers, more staff, more everything. The big discrepancy is what PTAs and parent groups can raise. They create foundations to raise money for the school. So I think it’s important that there are rules. For example, a PTA or a foundation cannot raise money for staff because staffing is something that should be equitable. If something is wildly successful at a school with foundation dollars, or PTA dollars, then we do need to look at making sure that that is also provided at schools with communities with fewer financial resources. That’s not to say that our families and low-income communities don’t have financial wealth, they also have social capital. There’s other ways that they can contribute, but that is a misconception that the school board funds certain schools better than others.

How can the school system make up for loss of learning during the pandemic?

That is probably the most important question in my opinion. We had achievement gaps before the pandemic that have gotten worse. Children of poverty – before the pandemic and more so now – are not performing at levels that we want them to be performing. So what do we do about it? We are trying some new academic interventions. We’re shifting from balanced literacy to structured literacy, such as phonics-based literacy instruction. We’re going back to that again. The science of reading tells us that that is a better approach and finally our school system is shifting to that. So that is going to make a big difference. If we had done this before the pandemic it would have made a big difference, but now we need it more than ever. The other big interventions are tutoring. It’s nationally recognized that tutoring works. We have to make sure that it’s aligned to what students are learning.

Before the pandemic, you had to pay to go to summer school unless you were going to get a waiver but now summer school is the norm for the students that need it and they’re particularly encouraged to take advantage of summer school. That’s additional time to either cover what you weren’t able to master during the school year or just a head start into what’s coming up ahead. And then finally, just making sure that our teachers are supported and that they have the professional development to be able to meet the needs of every student in the classroom.

What would you like to see done to improve student mental health support and services?

We have so many new mental health programs and initiatives in MCPS. What I want to see happen in the next year is what is working. Do students that need it the most have access to it? And then once we know what’s working, how do we build it into our base budget – because a lot of these things were funded through federal funds through grants and relief. A lot of our students have experienced trauma at home. And if your heart is hurting, your mind is not ready to learn. I want to see all these great things that we have started implemented correctly, evaluated for what’s working and built into our way of operating.

What are your thoughts on implementing protections for LGBTQ students in MCPS?

We need to make sure our policies are well implemented. We have a very strong and active parent community group that works with us and holds us accountable. We have expanded our groups to the middle schools and even elementary schools so there’s more allies. We continue to do an annual conference and opportunities for people to learn and connect with resources. We always want to hear from the public if something is not working well or sometimes we have a lot of discrepancies from one school to the other. It’s about being consistent and making sure that our schools do a good job with the implementation.

How do you view the school’s efforts at recruiting teachers during the labor shortage?

I am very pleased that we have a future educators pilot program. These are [MCPS] students that have identified interest in going into the field of education and will be connected with summer jobs and MCPS throughout their bachelor’s degree time. And when they finish, they’re going to have a job waiting for them in MCPS. I have been asking for it since I joined the board because I saw the need to be a leader and to be ahead of the game. We have the workforce here. They are bilingual, they’re multicultural, they understand our community. I want to strengthen this program. I think it would be a game changer in order to be able to get them some financial support to pay for college. We need to focus on retention as well. If the school culture is not the way it should be, if they’re not getting support, teachers are going to leave us.

What do you personally see as the top issues affecting the school system, and what do you want to do to make change or support existing policies?

Mental health and academic achievement. We need to make sure students affected by the pandemic are on track to achieve their goals. We now recognize mental health and its importance, how it impacts academic achievement. But the critical next step is to figure out what’s working so that we can continue to invest in their academic achievement.

I want to have every student that graduated MCPS have a plan for after high school. A third of our MCPS graduates do not pursue post-secondary education anywhere 12 months after graduating, and this is state data. I don’t know a lot of high school grads making a good starting salary without any post-secondary training. And I say training because it could be trade school-type training, it could be the military, it could be college. But I think that for the longest time, high school graduation has been the finish line. And that’s not cutting it. I think that we can do much better in preparing our students for the next step.

Early voting for the general election is Oct. 27 through Nov. 3. Mail-in ballots can be cast through the mail or at more than 50 ballot drop boxes countywide. 

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