The Montgomery County school board renamed its board room after longtime former member Patricia “Pat” O’Neill on Thursday, honoring the 23-year veteran who died in 2021 at the age of 71.
“She was the consummate public servant,” Rick O’Neill, Pat’s husband, said during the meeting. “Our family is very honored and I know Pat would be thrilled. She just loved what she did, never looked at it as a job.”
The board unanimously passed the resolution to rename the board room in its Rockville headquarters at 15 W. Gude Drive as the Patricia O’Neill Board of Education Room.
Board member Brenda Wolff said she was honored to make the motion to rename the board room. Wolff said she would talk by phone every morning with O’Neill, and the day after she died, Wolff received a call that had O’Neill’s caller ID. Wolff said she thought, “Oh my god, she’s calling from heaven.”
The resolution to rename the meeting room said O’Neill left “a lasting legacy of service with grace, leadership with purpose and commitment to community.”
School board President Julie Yang said the board will hold an event to formally dedicate the room in O’Neill’s honor later this spring.
O’Neill and her husband graduated from Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda in 1968, and the couple’s two children also graduated from Montgomery County public schools.
O’Neill joined the board in 1998, serving more than 23 years, the longest tenure of any board member. O’Neill participated in 500 meetings, and served as the board’s president five times and vice president six times.
O’Neill died Sept. 14, 2021, in her Bethesda home while watching a live stream of a County Council meeting with school district officials. At the time of her death, Wolff said O’Neill was “never afraid to stand for what she thought was right for students, even if it was unpopular.”
Over the years, O’Neill often served as a source of institutional knowledge about Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) for local media and frequently provided a historical perspective on issues before the board ranging from changing school start times to adjustments in school boundaries, which she said she personally had experienced while attending an MCPS school.
In 2022, the Norman R. Rales and Ruth Rales Foundation made a $10 million donation to the MCPS Educational Foundation to offer a scholarship in memory of O’Neill. The foundation began awarding $10,000 each to 200 graduating seniors from low- to moderate-income homes in 2023 and will continue to do so until 2028.
O’Neill won the Maryland Association of Boards of Education Charles Willis Award for outstanding school board service in 2009 and was named one of the 100 Most Powerful Women in the D.C. area by Washingtonian magazine in 2015.
