This article, originally published at 11:34 a.m., April 26, 2024, was updated at 11:36 a.m., April 29, 2024, to include information on why candidate Bethany Mandel did not attend the forum.
Closing the racial achievement gap, school safety and college and career readiness were among the topics that candidates running for the Montgomery County Board of Education discussed at a virtual forum Thursday.
Ten of the 14 candidates running for three seats in the May 14 primary election attended the forum hosted via Zoom by the Montgomery County Alumnae Chapter, Potomac Valley Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, as well as the MoCo Black Collective and the Black and Brown Coalition for Educational Equity and Excellence. Around 30 to 40 people tuned into the forum.
Those who attended included at-large incumbent Lynne Harris and challengers Sharif Hidayat, Melissa Kim, Fitzgerald Mofor and Rita Montoya. District 2 candidates Brenda Diaz, Ricky Mui and Natalie Zimmerman and District 2 incumbent Shebra Evans as well as one challenger, Laura Stewart, also attended.
Those who did not attend were Jonathan Long, who is running for the At-large seat; District 2 incumbent Rebecca Smondrowski and challenger Aby Thioye; and District 4 candidate Bethany Mandel. According to Mandel’s campaign, she could not attend because the forum was scheduled during Passover.
Each candidate was given 45 seconds to respond to six questions posed by moderators Wylea Chase, director of operations and community engagement for the Black and Brown Coalition, and Annie Foster Ahmed, chair of the social action committee for Potomac Valley Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.
When asked about how to address the disparity in the Black and brown student achievement gap among Montgomery County public school students, some candidates focused on ways that the school system could improve the classroom experience such as creating smaller class sizes, focusing on expanding universal pre-kindergarten and providing supportive programs for parents to be more involved in their child’s education.
Evans, who is seeking a third term on the school board, said closing the racial achievement gap is “something that we’ve been tackling for quite some time, not just in Montgomery County, but just across the U.S.” She noted her involvement in MCPS’s development of an equity accountability model for student achievement data is one way she has worked on the issue as a board member.
“We also switched to structured literacy and we have a new curriculum, Amplify for Knowledge, so I am very optimistic about what is going to take place with having rich content that is developmentally appropriate for our students,” Evans said, referring to a new elementary English Language Arts curricula that the school board approved in March.
Mofor took a different approach to the question, noting that the “biggest driver to the school-to-prison pipeline is not [officers in schools], it is the lack of educational confidence.
“Any 5% of students that interface with the juvenile justice system are functionally illiterate,” he said. “We have to focus on these things. We don’t focus on educational competency here in MCPS. What’s prioritized is political ideology and that’s something that will end under my leadership.”
Chase asked Mofor to clarify “what would end” under his leadership but was interrupted as Mofor began to respond. The exchange resulted in a tense moment in which Mofor and Chase talked over each other for about 20 seconds until Chase was able to complete her question.
Mofor then explained how the current school board has “spent over a million dollars litigating a case on inclusive curriculum, shoving and ramming ideology down the throats of parents and students.” He said the district does not prioritize educational competence among students, specifically Black male students, and as a board member he would not prioritize political ideology but “educational competence in math and English.”
In his closing statement, Mofor apologized to the moderators. He said he hoped they understood that “his passion and the energies are in no form or way of disrespect” but that he wanted to advocate for his community.
School Safety
A discussion of school safety included a debate on reinstating the school resource officers (SRO) program in MCPS schools. The debate came on the heels of recent incidents surrounding school safety, such as students being arrested with guns at school, the arrest of a student who had written a manifesto to plan a school shooting and an incident in which a trespasser at Kennedy High School in Silver Spring on April 19 had entered the school and wielded a knife.
Beginning in the 2021-2022 school year MCPS removed its school resource officers – police officers who were stationed at county high schools – and implemented its Community Engagement Officer (CEO) program, in which police officers patrol schools within a cluster but do not remain inside school buildings.
Diaz, Hidayat, Mofor and Mui said they were in favor of reinstating the SRO program and believed that the officers in schools were beneficial to building relationships with students. Hidayat, a former police officer, said SROs also helped to prevent students from entering the criminal justice system.
Zimmerman said the district “has little data on the SRO” program, “but the data we do have does support a school-to-prison pipeline.”
“Data that was collected by the National Association of School Resource Officers says that about two-thirds of those SROs see their main role as law enforcement. They don’t see their main role in the school as building connections. They don’t see their main role in the school as mentorship,” Zimmerman said.
She added that the school system also needs to evaluate its CEO program to consider “if we should continue with it, if we need to reevaluate it, what needs to be added to it or if it should be eliminated.”
College and career readiness
Candidates also offered similar ideas when it came to the discussion of students being prepared for higher education or a career post-graduation.
Diaz noted that expanding magnet and vocational programs across the county was key in helping students be prepared for life after high school. She said her daughter was interested in a business program at Gaithersburg High School but was unable to pursue that track because busing from her home school of Quince Orchard High School wasn’t available.
Harris noted that the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, a landmark education reform bill passed in 2018, has a “great visionary look into where we need to be” but the current public education policy is “mirrored in the 1950s.”
Harris said the state’s current graduation requirements should be reevaluated to determine whether they are relevant to “21st-century students.”
“We need to reform the way we provide our students opportunity,” Harris said.