With less than three weeks until the Nov. 5 general election, candidates for the Montgomery County school board shared their perspectives Thursday night on issues including safety and inequities in local public schools during a forum at Leisure World in Silver Spring.
All six candidates in the three nonpartisan races participated in the forum hosted by the Democratic and Republican Clubs of Leisure World. The candidates are incumbent Lynne Harris and Rita Montoya who are competing for an open at large seat, incumbent Shebra Evans and Laura Stewart vying for the District 4 seat and candidates Brenda Diaz and Natalie Zimmerman competing for the District 2 seat.
Thursday’s forum was one of many held in recent weeks but isn’t the last to be held before the election. On Monday, the Luxmanor Citizens Association will join the Walter Johnson High School PTSA and the Greater Farmland Civic Association to host a forum from 7:30 to 9 p.m. in the school’s auditorium at 6400 Rock Spring Drive in Bethesda.
At Leisure World, attendees listened in on the event in the clubhouse ballroom for the event moderated by Louis Peck, a contributing editor for MoCo360 and Bethesda Magazine.
The 90-minute forum raised questions addressed at previous forums, such as the candidates’ views on their priorities for district spending. It also covered other issues, such as whether serving on the school board should become a full-time job.
Are candidates worried about inequities within MCPS?
After Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Thomas Taylor highlighted inequalities within the school district in a Tuesday morning breakfast club discussion, all candidates echoed his concerns about achievement and opportunity gaps.
Although each agreed with Taylor’s assessment that more progress needs to be made in reducing the inequities, every candidate proposed different solutions.
As she has in other forums, Harris proposed creating a strategic plan for programs to ensure all programs offered by the district are accessible to all students.
Montoya highlighted the disparities in academic proficiency rates for Black and Latino students when compared to their white and Asian counterparts. Montoya said the issue needed to be investigated and suggested that high-impact tutoring could make a difference.
Zimmerman said the district needed high-quality implicit bias training, something she said that doesn’t currently exist.
“I was offered a training where I had to click through some slides and send an email that I completed,” Zimmerman said. “That’s not enough for us to actually create real change.”
Diaz said schools needed to implement grade-level appropriate assignments, to eliminate phones from the classroom and to not allow elementary schoolers to have Chromebooks, which are provided to MCPS students.
For her part, Evans said the district should ensure it was receiving a “return on investment” from its curricula and academic interventions by collecting data on student progress. If interventions aren’t working, Evans said, the district should stop using them.
Stewart said more data should be provided on school performance so the public can understand how schools are doing. The district should have “emergency response teams,” Stewart said, that could be deployed in low-performing schools to determine the issues they’re experiencing.
How should the board prioritize the budget and Blueprint for Maryland’s Future goals?
In a question about the merit of the state’s landmark education reform law, Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, and how MCPS should prioritize its goals while facing a tight budget, the candidates highlighted the importance of college and career readiness and early childhood education.
Montoya, Evans and Harris said they would prioritize pre-kindergarten expansion and early childhood education.
“I was a Head Start graduate,” Montoya said, referring to the federal program that provides early childhood education. “I got a strong foundation in spite of a lot of challenges for my family because I got to go to Head Start. And from there I did well.”
Similarly, Montoya, Diaz and Stewart expressed support for prioritizing college and career readiness.
“We have problems with kids learning algebra, and to get into any STEM fields, and actually a lot of good fields, you need that really solid base in algebra,” Stewart said.
Zimmerman noted the district is having to do “more with less” and that the community should be involved in the budget process.
Should the board be full time and have more oversight?
Some candidates expressed strong support for making the current ‘part-time positions’ on the board into full-time positions, due to the amount of work and oversight needed for the largest school district in the state. Evans said the board should be spending time examining district policies to add, remove or revise them when necessary.
“With a full-time job, if we are positioned that way, we can do what we’ve been elected to do, which is continue to be policy makers,” Evans said.
Harris pointed out the district is conducting a workflow analysis to find redundancies or challenges in areas such as oversight processes. She said the analysis would help the district keep better track of procurements and memorandums of understanding.
Zimmerman agreed the board needed to be full time – and it needed members that aren’t afraid to ask hard questions.
Diaz said MCPS has lost track of its mission, which is to be a place that educates all of its students, although she didn’t say whether serving on the board should be a full-time job.
“We need to go through the budget, line item by line … to make sure that every single dollar is dedicated to our children,” Diaz said.
Did the board do enough to address the Beidleman scandal?
Harris said the 2023 controversy over sexual harassment allegations involving former middle school principal Joel Beidleman was a “symptom” of the unprofessional division of compliance and investigation at the time. Harris noted the district is working on implementing recommendations from the county’s Office of Inspector General to improve the complaint and investigative office, a sentiment Evans also shared.
Diaz said the incident, which involved teacher complaints, showed that teachers aren’t respected in the classroom. Zimmerman said she’s filed complaints in the last school year that the district hasn’t responded to. She also suggested the board and MCPS should more deeply investigate school climate data about what educators think about working within their schools.
Montoya said it’s difficult to tell if necessary safeguards are in place in response to the Beidleman scandal, because community members don’t always get information on the topic, something she said she believes contributes to the problem.
How should safety in the classroom be addressed?
Diaz said the school-to-prison pipeline didn’t exist – a claim Zimmerman, Harris and Montoya disputed – and advocated for reintroducing school resource officers (SROs), which are officer assigned to patrol schools.
“When I was at Gaithersburg High School, we had school resource officers. They formed relationships with our students,” Diaz said. “They were mentors to our students. They were teachers to our students. They prevented many assaults, many abuses.”
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the school-to-prison pipeline is a trend in which students are “funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.” A 2021 study found that “censure of school misbehavior causes increases in adult crime—that there is, in fact, a school-to-prison pipeline,” and the negative impacts are largest for minorities and boys.
Montoya said that based on conversations with parents and families, many thought police officers should be responding to serious incidents within a school, but didn’t want officers “hassling” students because someone believes they’re being disrespectful.
“Any officers who are engaging with our kids in any capacity need to be vetted and trained properly,” Montoya said.
Other candidates, including Zimmerman, Harris and Stewart, said increasing the number of adults in schools that students have connections with would serve as another way to prevent safety issues.
Eight days of early voting will be held from Oct. 24 to 31. Check here for a list of early voting sites. For more information about the candidates, check out the MoCo360 2024 Voters Guide.
