Editor’s note: Bethesda Beat is running a series of profiles on Montgomery County Board of Education candidates running in the Nov. 8 general election. Today’s profiles focus on District 5 candidates Valerie Coll and Brenda Wolff. All candidates were asked the same questions. Some answers were shortened for length and clarity.
A retired Montgomery County Public Schools teacher and an incumbent running for her second term are running for the District 5 seat on the Board of Education.
Valerie Coll, 62, was an elementary school teacher in MCPS for 32 years. She lives in Silver Spring.
Brenda Wolff, 69, is serving her second one-year term as president of the school board and has served on the board since 2018. She lives in Silver Spring.
Valerie Coll
Who are you, what do you do, and why are you running?
I am a 62-year-old retired veteran elementary teacher in Montgomery County. I raised my children here in Montgomery County; they both graduated and went through MCPS. And I came here to work in 1989. And this has been my home, it’s where we raised our family, where I’ve had my professional career, and I am someone who is passionate about making sure education works. And after retiring from the classroom, I still feel like there’s a lot that I can do. With my skill set and my experience, I feel like that’s a voice I can bring to the table on the Board of Education, in terms of all education issues that surround Montgomery County. I can add depth and breadth to the discussion, and hopefully some common sense to the decision making.
What are your thoughts on financial equity in MCPS and making sure all schools have equal resources?
I think this is one of those places where my direct classroom experience day in, day out really brings something to the table that people don’t actually understand. When we talk about equity, you’re talking about parts of the county where some elementary schools have PTAs that have fundraised budgets of over $100,000, And then you’re talking about a high school in a different section of the county, who’s desperately doing a GoFundMe just so that they can have a snack table at their football games. At some schools that I’ve taught at, there’s a real struggle and you’re maintaining an awful lot of support services for families just for them to have food on the table to fight their food insecurity or you’re making sure that there’s clothing or winter coats available for kids. These are very real everyday pieces that affect somebody’s ability to be able to come to school and feel like they’re ready to be educated.
There’s two prongs here that you have to look at. First, you have to look at … the viability of the way people are allowed to invest funds into the private organizations that support the schools, if that formula needs to be addressed. And you also have to go back and take a look at the study about boundaries. Do our boundaries need to be readdressed?And do we need to have a better formula based on educational load rather than just student enrollment? And I think those are very hard conversations to have. A lot of people don’t want to have these hard conversations, because politically, they don’t want to upset those communities that have the deepest pockets. But there has to be that discomforting discussion and it has to be held.
How can the school system make up for loss of learning during the pandemic?
As an educator, I will tell you that that idea of loss of learning is upsetting to me for two reasons. Number one, it’s upsetting that students had to deal with the trauma of worrying about their families, about not having access to the full breadth of surrounding services that we’d like to have in education. But I will also say to you that as an educator that term loss of learning is ridiculous. And I say this because everything we do, everything we teach, the pedagogy of instruction is based on student development. And if a student misses something, the opportunity to go back and relearn and reteach and get exposure to something is built into the system. And when the system says, well, we lost that learning because we’re looking at how third graders this year did, compared to third graders last year, that’s comparing apples and oranges. Learning loss can be regained once school started back up again, and they were still getting academic instruction, even though it was different.
It’s time for the Board of Education to be able to say to the district “this is what we are doing now to make sure that every child has access to learning.” What COVID did teach us and what lockdowns did teach us was how deep the inequity was, for children to have access to their learning in a variety of ways. And it also really brought home how so many students are operating without parents that are able to support their learning because of a multitude of reasons that exist.
What would you like to see done to improve student mental health support and services?
I am very much in favor of making sure that number one, at all levels, we are looking at the recommended ratios of counselors to students which is grossly out of balance particularly in elementary schools. And when it’s also exacerbated in elementary schools — when you have counselors that are in schools that instead of providing counseling services, [they are] covering classes or having to work as substitute teachers, you’re taking people away from the very service that they’ve trained [for] and want to provide to students. I think one of the other things that we need to do is we need to take a look at and really support this idea of the wellness centers in high schools. But I think beyond that idea of the wellness centers in high schools, making sure that they also perhaps focus much earlier in the rollout of these programs. Middle school is a tremendously difficult period. They’re learning that they’re feeling that independence, but there’s so much fear about preparing and fitting in. So I think we need to do a much better job of that.
Something very simple as we can do in the county is with the new 988 [federal suicide hotline] program that we have, is put that number on the back of every student ID in middle school and high school. How amazing would it be if in part of our acknowledging to kids that sometimes you need to ask for help or you just need somebody to talk to, we put that 988 information on the back of student IDs or in their agendas and [normalize] that idea of discussing how are we feeling and know that it’s okay to ask questions to reach out, making sure that we’re really informing kids about that and supporting them. It’s just as important as encouraging them to eat a healthy diet.
What are your thoughts on implementing protections for LGBTQ students in MCPS?
It goes back to making sure that communication is happening in the community at large and understanding why these policies are necessary to make sure that our students are supported and ready to learn to the best of their ability. Because everything we have to do as a school system comes down to making sure that we’re growing learners. We’re growing people that have skills, that have content knowledge, that have the ability to question and reason. And if students are feeling doubts within themselves, or they’re feeling pressures to not be able to be their authentic selves, then they’re not accessible. Their ability to access learning is not there to the point that we want that to be and we know it needs to be. So we have to make sure we’re educating people about this very real student need and we have to be ready for the pushback because there are going to be people who say, ‘Well, that shouldn’t be in education, we should only reach reading, writing, arithmetic.’ So you can teach content till the cows come home, but if the kids aren’t there to learn it, then what are you teaching? You’re teaching in a vacuum.
I think one of the things that you have to do is you have to make sure that we’re also honoring and providing education to staff, because we want staff to know that they’re aware of exactly what student needs are and sometimes people on staff are left out of that. It’s not just the classroom educating, but making sure that we’re training bus drivers to school security, to any of the other people in the cafeteria or in building services that are providing direct-to-student service, in understanding why this is important and how we can honor that by honoring the kids and frankly, honoring their families because we know kids come from a variety of structured families and we know that our staff has that same experience.
How do you view the school’s efforts at recruiting teachers during the labor shortage?
I don’t fault MCPS because if you’ve been in education, and if you’ve done the research, even if you’re not in education, you’ve seen there are some people trying to turn education into a gig economy. The expectation is people will only want to teach for a little while and then they’ll go get a “real job.” There are also people who have not traditionally seen themselves reflected in the classroom, so they’ve not thought of themselves as educators. And there’s the financial toll. People are spending tens of thousands of dollars getting their college education, and it will take so long to pay off student loans. And people are denigrating education, people are demeaning teachers, wanting grades changed or this changed, and there’s political arguments about what you should be allowed to teach.
I would much prefer we grow our own teachers from the students we have in front of us. Let’s encourage those kids. Let’s have future teachers classes. Let’s give kids more credit for the work they’re doing in school, really encouraging kids to get involved with tutoring in elementary or middle schools. We should be doing everything we can to build our own in-house programming to get kids into schools. We should be looking at our own kids and encouraging them to see MCPS is not just a place they attend and graduate from, but a place that they can come back to to build their ownership as citizens in the community and as contributing members of the community.
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?
I think there’s two things that tie together and one of them is transparent management. And I think that goes back to whether or not the Board of Education is perceived as a rubber stamp for the superintendent, or having a Board of Ed that takes ownership of its mission, which is to provide direction and policymaking and oversight of the school system. And I think that needs to happen in a much more engaged and transparent way. We need to make sure the board is much more open in going out to schools and talking to people in the community and making sure we’re reaching every part of our community. Because we’ve got a lot of people in our community that are not going to be able to go to a PTA meeting on a Tuesday night – they have to work, or there’s a language issue or there’s not transportation for them to get there and get home – so there’s that kind of transparency of leadership that we need to have.
The other piece of that is communication. We have a multimillion-dollar communication department, and yet when COVID happened, we spent a half million dollars paying a contractor for crisis management messaging. Why? If you’ve got the communication department, isn’t it their job to communicate? Shouldn’t they be able to respond in real time to real issues? We’re hiring more people at higher-paid jobs, but you still have issues with communication surrounding the shooting at [Col. Zadok Magruder High School in Derwood], for example, when parents were getting different information from their kids and from the school. It goes to that lack of oversight of communication. With 32 years in the classroom, every day was a day for transparency and every day was a day of communication. And I think in service on the Board of Education, that’s an awareness and experience that I can bring from within MCPS.
Brenda Wolff
Who are you, what do you do, and why are you running?
I am a civil rights attorney. My whole career has been about opportunity and access, and that’s why I’m running. I have observed that around the county, everyone does not have the same opportunities and access. There are disparities. If you look at what’s going on across the county, there are disparities in programming, in my opinion there are disparities in facilities. There are a lot of things that need some work. As a Black woman, and the first in my family to go to college, what education can do for you is in my mind sort of a transformational power. So I’m looking to provide that high-quality public school education.
What are your thoughts on financial equity in MCPS and making sure all schools have equal resources?
Equitable resources are not going to fix the issue of the opportunity gap. Sometimes you have to provide more resources. You can’t be financially equitable and solve this problem because the needs may differ depending upon where you are. So you have to provide the resources based on the needs of a particular school, particular building, particular area.
I have asked for a program evaluation to determine what programs are where. I want a whole list of what’s available everywhere around the county because I believe that there are certain areas that are not getting similar opportunities. For example, down county has three middle school magnets. Well, the east county needs a middle school magnet. We have a P-TECH program at Clarksburg [High School]. Well, that’s an excellent program, but it needs to be in every part of the county. It’s very hard when you’ve got a geographically-large county like this, but the opportunities need to be available in every corner of the county. So looking at the programs and where they are, and what’s available to us is a big starting point for me. Also, we need to evaluate the effectiveness of these programs because should we even be continuing them? That’s probably where I would start. We’ve already done a facility review and kind of mapped out what needs to be changed where, and I think that that’s going to impact and show improvement of some of the facilities, particularly over here in the east county.
How can the school system make up for loss of learning during the pandemic?
We have taken a multifaceted sort of approach to this, so we got to look at academics as well as social and emotional [needs]. So we have targeted summer programs; we have provided summer programming to everybody this summer. We hired social workers and we upped the technology with some of the funds we received. We are providing professional development to our teachers. The reason we are enhancing the professional development we’re providing is because of the learning loss. The teachers have had to scaffold their teaching. We’ve done a myriad of things. We put wellness centers with the help of the County Council’s funding in all of our high schools. We’re doing everything that we can think of to ensure that our students are getting back on track.
What would you like to see done to improve student mental health support and services?
We are already providing a lot of support for mental health. We’re standing up wellness centers in every school. But we have long-term goals and short-term goals. In the short term, we’ve added social workers, we’ve added counselors, school psychologists, but my long-term goal is to make this seamless. We need to have a web of support for these students with an emphasis on what they need to make them ready to learn because you’ve got to remember we’re educators. We’re not really mental health professionals. So what we’re doing is trying to get them to a point where they can receive the education they need.
We’re also looking at the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future (the state’s education reform plan),, it’s going to focus on creating community schools. That’s going to go a long way, because community schools provide wraparound services and connections to the county resources. These have to be rolled out as a big part of our mental health support system. So for the short term, we’ve got what we got and for the long term, I want to see a seamless approach.
What are your thoughts on implementing protections for LGBTQ students in MCPS?
As a civil rights attorney, and as the former office director for the Office of Civil Rights and deputy director, I bring all of that experience to my work on the board. And what I know that we need in addition to the policies and guidelines is the messaging and the actions of the people to continually reinforce the values that we try to portray, and the respect for all of our students.
How do you view the school’s efforts at recruiting teachers during the labor shortage?
I know that our human resources office has worked double time, and they are being commended for what they have done. But since we’ve been on the board, I know Karla [Silvestre] and myself have said we need to grow our own [teachers]. And this year, we had the first cohort of our Grow Your Own students. It was really exciting. Because this is a competitive area, we don’t have schools of education that are turning out teachers here like they do in North Carolina or Pennsylvania. So it’s very important that we figure out other ways to do this. We also have to professionalize teaching as a career because teachers have been underpaid and undervalued for so long, that’s my personal opinion. And I think that the [Blueprint for Maryland’s Future] is going to help us with that, it’s finally going to get us to treat our teachers like professionals and make this job more desirable. Because right now, if you have a master’s degree, and you’re just making $77,000, and you’re teaching chemistry, you can go to work in a biotech industry. So we’ve got to make it more desirable for people to be teachers, and we’ve got to show them the respect that they deserve as professionals. I also think that we [have] got to support career ladders for all of our employees. We need to have a system that allows people to move up because if you don’t, people are going to leave. So we need those career ladders.
Education is the cornerstone of our county. It came to bear during COVID. Education is the most important thing that’s going to move us forward as a county.
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?
I think the main issues for us right now are safety, mental health and recovery of learning loss. And they’re also intertwined, if you think about it, because kids have to be in a certain mental state in order to receive the learning that we’re offering, and they also have to feel safe in our buildings. There are a lot of things that are going to affect this — there will be changes in the County Council. The state blueprint coming in is going to make a big difference to what we’re able to provide. And I hope that is successful in getting the money out to the counties because you do know that there are a number of counties that feel they just can’t afford this, so there is a lot of pushback on it. So the top three things in my mind are ensuring the safety of our students, recovering from learning loss and the mental health, social and emotional health of the students and the staff, because it’s just been hard on everybody.
The [School Resource Officers] were removed from the schools in Montgomery County, but we were already in the process of reviewing what was going on with the SRO program, because we were looking at some of the data on the disparities. Like I said, I’m a civil rights attorney. So the real reason I even got back into running for the board was the result of having done a review here in 1997 of disproportional representation of Black students in special education. And what we found out [was] that discipline was causing those numbers to be out of whack. [Students] can be referred for a lot of discipline issues, and there were disparities in how discipline was being applied. So we thought we had addressed that issue and closed out the compliance review. But I started looking at the data in 2012 and the numbers were not satisfactory to me. I was running a mentoring program for African American girls in an MCPS high school and they were telling me about things they were being disciplined for and other students were not and I started looking into that and I said, ‘Oh, I can help them.’ And the more I’ve worked with those students, the more I came to realize that opportunities and applications and policies have not always been the same all over this county.
Early voting for the general election runs through Nov. 3. Mail-in ballots can be cast through the mail or at more than 50 ballot drop boxes countywide.