Clarksburg High School junior Praneel Suvarna was elected as the next Student Member of the Board of Education (SMOB) after more than 58,927 Montgomery County Public Schools middle and high school students cast ballots on Wednesday.
Suvarna ran against Montgomery Blair High School junior Sam Ross. Suvarna received 53% of the vote and Ross received 47%, according to an MCPS press release.
The SMOB is a voting member of the district’s Board of Education. Montgomery County is one of two counties in the state to give its SMOB full voting rights on the school board. The position is unpaid but does receive a $5,000 college scholarship, student service learning hours and one honors-level social studies credit, according to the MCPS website.
From a pool of eight students who filed to run for the position, Ross and Suvarna were nominated as SMOB finalists by more than 400 voting middle and high school delegates in February.
Suvarna, who lives in Clarksburg, told MoCo360 Tuesday that consistent and clear communication and using social media to connect with students were key elements of his SMOB campaign. He added that he also prioritized scheduling school visits with members of his campaign team.
“There is a lot of power that the student of the board has, but the biggest power is being able to connect directly to the students,” Suvarna said.
While visiting schools, Suvarna said that many students told him that they wanted to see “quality of life changes that make their time more enjoyable in the school system” such as better school lunches, funding for extracurricular activities and improved homework policies.
He added: “School safety needs to be addressed. The drug and opioid crisis needs to be addressed. The student mental health crisis needs to be addressed. And we’ve been working on showing students that we have a plan for every single thing,” he said.
Suvarna said he also wants to bring more transparency to the processes and decision-making at the school board and central office.
He mentioned that when the school board decided to delay the construction of the auditorium at two new schools, Crown High School in Gaithersburg and Charles W. Woodward High School in Rockville, “that was something that a lot of students didn’t know about, didn’t even think was possible or understand why MCPS would do that.”
Suvarna will begin his term on July 1, taking over from Sami Saeed, a senior at Richard Montgomery High School the SMOB for the 2023-2024 school year. Suvarna said one of his first actions would be to put forth a resolution that would call for security guards to be equipped with naloxone – an opioid overdose reversal drug – and include training to administer naloxone in students’ health classes.
Suvarna, a dually enrolled student at Montgomery College, serves as the vice president of the Montgomery County Regional Student Government Association and is the junior class president at Clarksburg High. He also has experience working with the Student Advisory Mental Health Board and MoCo for Change, a student-run organization focused on social justice issues.