Editor’s note: This story, which was originally published May 12 at 4:56 p.m. was updated May 13 at 11:42 a.m. to correct the number of people who attended the event.
Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) and the school board moved from their aging headquarters in a former school to a modern office building at 15 W. Gude Drive in Rockville in 2024 — one that Superintendent Thomas Taylor notes is white and several stories tall.
“It quite literally is an ivory tower,” Taylor told a group of about 50 people who attended a District 18 Democratic Breakfast Club meeting Monday morning at the Parkway Deli in Silver Spring.
Just about two months shy of his one-year anniversary on July 1, Taylor said he is hoping to be the leader who can shift the district from an ‘ivory tower mentality’ into one focused on decision-making at the school level.
“We have talented principals, we have talented educators, and when decision-making is closer to what’s happening in the classroom, the decisions tend to get a lot better because the context is there,” Taylor said. “And when decisions are removed from principals, and when 90% of the decision-making ends up in the ivory tower, it tends not to be as good.”
In addition to realigning decision-making, he talked about challenges with special education and lax academic expectations. Taylor talked for approximately 30 minutes and took questions from those in attendance for about 30 minutes.
Taylor said he is hoping funding included in the district’s school board’s $3.65 billion budget proposal for 2026 fiscal year, if approved by the County Council, will make a dent in some of the challenges facing the district. However, councilmembers have said it will be difficult to fully fund the district’s budget request because of other fiscal constraints and uncertainties.
The MCPS budget proposal includes funding for 688 special education positions, with 188 to be new teachers and 500 to be hired as paraeducators, according to MCPS. Of the 500 paraeducator positions, 366 are existing part-time jobs that would be converted to full time and 134 of the positions would be new hires.
Even that number of positions won’t be enough, Taylor said, because the district hasn’t been keeping up with the staffing levels as it should have.
“If you were to ask me, what keeps me up at night, it is special education,” Taylor said. “[The budget] actually doesn’t improve our standing in any way, shape or form. There’s a lot more that we’re going to have to do to get ahead of that issue.”
After one attendee asked about funding going toward counsel for litigation of special education cases, Taylor said it was some of the “worst money spent” in the current budget. He said the district has challenges when it comes to ensuring procedures and timelines for special education are followed, resulting in litigation against the district.
The majority of special education litigation is adjudicated by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, Taylor said. With the “federal government’s effective collapse” under President Donald Trump, there will likely be a period where the litigation isn’t addressed, he noted. While that might be good for MCPS’s bottom line, such a delay will be bad for students.
“We need to hurry up and get our processes a lot tighter and be a lot more intentional about what we’re doing in terms of special education services and things that could potentially be litigated, and to work through that with deference to the kids and families that we’re serving because it’s been big misses for us up until this point,” Taylor said.
He also said over the past five years, and even before COVID-19 began in 2020, the district has experienced decreasing academic performance, increasing issues with student behavior and inequity with school programs.
“About half of our kids are performing at … expected proficiency, and I think it’s because we got soft on expectations,” Taylor said. “And the last five years, I think, kind of show us getting progressively softer on expectations.”
To address the issues, MCPS recently shifted its grading policy and updated the student code of conduct for the 2025-2026 school year, Taylor noted.
One attendee asked whether more full-length novels could be included in the curriculum for grades nine and 10. Taylor said a review of the curriculum is on the horizon.
