Your school board vote this year is a matter of life and death

By A.J. Campbell

We trust our kids to public schools. We want to keep them safe from dangerous school buildings,  getting sick from COVID,  and overcrowded schools.  The stakes have never been higher in this election for our kids. We should give school board races the focus they deserve and not make them a popularity contest. Our kids deserve better.  I want to see an issue-oriented race with robust plans for tackling our big issues. 

We can't overlook Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) troubling receipts on keeping our kids safe when we vote this year for the school board. We have seen the worrisome videos of rats running around in classrooms from predominantly Latinx and Black (Source), South Lake Elementary, that have shaken parents to the core (Source). It is impossible to escape the fact that if those conditions existed at Bethesda Elementary School, with a majority white and Asian population, that it would not be fixed in a week (Source).

The redistricting battle laid bare the grave concerns some parents have about moving their child to another school. Traditionally, when students don't go to their home school, it is because they were offered new programs. Moving students from one school to another does not have to be controversial, and it has to become part of our annual evaluation.

We have to look no further than the whiplash and slapdash way the partial opening and total closing of the schoolhouse was managed to know that level-headed leadership is needed on the Montgomery County School Board. The way MCPS mismanaged the process defies comprehension. The opening plan was incomprehensible and largely unworkable from the start. It was a cocktail-napkin idea that never went anywhere. It was a PowerPoint with no plan to back it up.  If we are going to open the schoolhouse doors in February, we need an initial plan with a clear path with demonstrable goals. We can't afford to get this wrong. Teachers won't stand for an ill-prepared, understaffed, underfunded school opening, and neither will parents.  

We need candidates with real plans to diffuse these divisive issues, putting forth a transparent process for evaluating over and under crowding in a way that is reviewed and published every year. We can't continue to let these kinds of issues devolve into screaming matches where both sides hurl insults and pejoratives at each other, modeling the worst kind of human behavior for our kids.

If we want to deal with some of the outstanding issues facing our school district, we have to get serious about the race. We need less Orwellian doublespeak and more solutions. We need outsiders who will challenge MCPS, fighting for what parents and students want. The stakes of the down-ballot elections can't be overlooked. The most important races are happening at the school board level. Our children's lives are at stake. We can't leave it to people who will rubber-stamp the school district policy.