Councilmember Leggett on school fees: "No way I would support that"

Washington Post, March 10, 1994

... council member Isiah Leggett (D-At Large), another member of the education committee, said he is adamantly opposed to fees for students.

"Rich parents will be able to afford it, and poor students will get waivers, which means we would be riding [on] the backs of the middle class, and there's no way I would support that," Leggett said.

MCPS continues to charge lots of fees, including illegal curricular fees.  Ike, what happened?

Scroll to the bottom of the article for Leggett's quote. 

Leggett - No way that I would support fees

Rotting, leaking, and neglected in the BOE president's backyard

Are these pictures of a neglected school in a disadvantaged community? Perhaps an aging school in a district that has run out of funds?

Actually, these are photos taken by a parent just last week at the crown jewel of high schools in Montgomery County, Walt Whitman. Only 17 years old, Whitman's roof leaks so badly in spots that buckets have to be placed in the auxiliary gym during storms. Exterior water damage is also extensive and can easily be seen in the photo above. The basketball court hasn't been restriped in years, and the nets are obviously in need of replacement.

Why are even the newest MCPS buildings in such poor condition? MCPS has announced plans to fund construction of many new schools over the next decade, but will MCPS adequately fund maintainance of existing buildings?

One year later -- Has MCPS made progress?

Exactly one year ago today, The Montgomery Sentinel published President Obama, Take My Superintendent, Please!, one of a series of articles about Dr. Weast and MCPS by the late Wayne Goldstein.

In the article, Mr. Goldstein made the following 10 suggestions for reform:

1. Hire enough BOE staff to provide independent verification of MCPS performance claims. Take these staff from MCPS, including part of its Office of Shared Accountability, put them under a Chief of Staff who reports only to the BOE, and make the Ombudsman a separate position where the office is also physically removed from the BOE offices.
2. Ask the state legislature to double or triple BOE salaries so that members will be able to justify to themselves and their families putting in the hours that the job demands.
3. Ask to be part of CountyStat and accept their advice, ask the independent County Inspector General and the County Council Office of Legislative Oversight to do lots of audits and studies and make lots of recommendations for improvement.
4. Greatly strengthen MCPS and BOE ethics laws and enforcement so that MCPS officials who cut big corners will find themselves out of a job.
5. Provide very tight oversight of all school Independent Activity Funds, even putting them under centralized control.
6. Rewrite regulations to strengthen community involvement, and otherwise bring back unscripted community participation.
7. Put all MCPS contracts, checks, and credit card charges online in a searchable data base.
8. Make contract funding sources and actions for all goods and services as transparent and as detailed as possible.
9. Have BOE staff regularly scrutinize certain of Weast’s and his top staff’s activities, such as his attending conferences for 57 days in 2008, and the extravagant amounts spent on staff meals and entertainment.
10. Start thinking about what you really want in the next superintendent, which means ruthlessly examining all of Weast’s big failures, studying his modest but genuine successes, deciding what kind of leader can best clean up the mess he created over 12 years, and deciding how you can most honestly try to improve student performance and not to be fooled again by yourselves or another superintendent more focused on marketing claimed successes than enacting genuine positive change.

Now, a year later, it appears that even the most modest of Mr. Goldstein's suggestions have not been implemented by our Board of Education.

MCPS Math and the Monocacy Madness

Our friends in the Gifted and Talented Association have agonized about Montgomery County School Superintendent Dr. Weast and math for years, stating that MCPS math is shallow on teaching arithmetic concepts needed to prepare our children to take their place in society.

Here is another demonstration of Dr. Weast's failure in math.

Dr. Weast announced he plans to close Monocacy Elementary School at the end of this school year because of declining enrollment.  

Wait - don't we have over 400 portables next to schools across the county?   Three portables are currently sited at Monocacy.  Are we hearing that the school population is rising?

So why close Monocacy now?  According to Dr. Weast, this will save $1 million dollars.  How?  He doesn't say.  Won't the kids still need to be in a classroom somewhere in the county?  Won't the teachers and staff  be placed elsewhere and paid?  And school buses?  What about that new roof?  Don't forget, we still need to keep a vacant building heated, so the pipes don't freeze.

Sorry, but the capacity is needed elsewhere - down the road in Clarksburg, where Dr. Weast plans on building two new elementary schools.  And yes, MCPS can always add on to Poolesville, with more portables in the short term and an addition at an estimated cost of $14 million - oops, that's not in the current plan.

Are Dr. Weast's projections all that accurate?  You need to look no further than Matsunaga ES, an overcapacity school that was supposed to be relieved by the opening of Little Bennett.  Matsunaga still has portables - so what happened there?

And Wootton High School with its mega additions a few years back is still over capacity.  Wootton manages by running College Institute classes in cooperation with Montgomery College and sending a signficant portion of its kids out on internships, so they get the staffing allocations without having the kids in the building.   Don't forget the monster development called Science City coming to the Wootton cluster with no new schools on the table.

I would be remiss to not mention the White Flint buildup.  Again, more building without more school capacity.

Dr. Weast doesn't get the math or the big picture.  Saving $1 million dollars in operating budget costs by closing Monocacy and then spending $14 million in capital costs for an addition to Poolesville ES does not make sense.  Given the Balkanization of our county by individual clusters, the budget makes even less sense - robbing from Poolesville cluster to satisfy new MoCo residents in Clarskburg doesn't make sense,  especially when the rest of the county has unmet needs too.

Closing any school in MoCo doesn't make sense, especially when we can't accomodate the students we currently have without the extensive use of portable learning cottages.  Dr. Weast's proposal is more than foolish  - it is almost unconscionable to continue to look at the cluster model as individual units without even considering the movement of programs or boundaries.

To repeat the mantra from the elementary school teachers across the county, its time to reteach and relearn the budget math.

WUSA-TV: School Leader Wants To Exclude Pain In The *#&@! Parents

From WUSA-TV (channel 9) news:

A big controversy is brewing tonight in Montgomery County over a school board member blasting parents who take a little too much of an interest in their kids' education.

It started with a comment from Patricia O'Neill at the May 12 board meeting "If I was the principal working on this I might not pick the PIA's, the pain in the ass people to be at the table."

For the entire story, click here.

Rotating Promethean Boards

On January 8, 2008 (a little over a year ago), the Montgomery County Board of Education received a presentation on Technology.

Board of Education member Chris Barclay asked MCPS staff the question about how to transfer knowledge to those classes, since not all classes will have Promethean Boards.

According to page 7 of the Board of Education minutes:

http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/boe/meetings/minutes/2008/010808.min.pdf

"Staff explained that the Promethean Boards will be rotated so that all students will have exposure to this technology."

A question, therefore, for Nancy Navarro and Shirley Brandman:

1. When did the plan change from "rotating" the Promethean Boards to buying thousands of them?

Can we look forward to receiving the answer to this question when the County Council Education committee takes up the issue of the Promethean Boards lease/purchase on February 23, 2009?

What Really Motivates Parent Activists

Today's Washington Post include Letters to the Editor on "What Really Motivates Parent Activists".

Navarro Board of Ed. Breaks Open Meetings Law

On January 30, 2009, the State of Maryland Open Meetings Compliance Board issued an opinion that the Montgomery "County Board did violate the Act in its failure to properly complete a written statement of the reason for the closing of the meeting on September 9."

The Open Meetings Compliance Board also found that the Montgomery County Board of Education was "not correct" in their assertion that the complainant bears the burden of proof and that there is a presumption that no violation has occurred.


In response to the filing of this complaint the Montgomery County Board of Education voluntarily changed its procedure for going into a closed session. Since the filing of this complaint, members of the public can now observe the Board voting to go into closed session prior to the Board room doors being closed. The sign stating "Board members and staff only" that is at the entrance to the conference room used for closed sessions is now to be taken down to permit the public to freely enter and observe the vote of the Board to go into closed session.

The Open Meetings Compliance Board cited the MCPS Board of Education for a violation of $10-508(d)(2)(ii) of the Open Meetings Act. The Open Meetings Board opinion states that in order to close a meeting of the MCPS Board of Education, the Board must,

"not simply cite the statutory authority, but must disclose the topic of discussion in order to allow the public to access compliance by comparing the cited authority and report topic."..."Here the written statement provided the public no information except that the meeting was closed, among other reasons, for the County Board to receive legal advice. Thus, in closing the meeting of September 9, the County Board violated $10-508(d)(2)(ii)."

What did the Board of Education fail to disclose on September 9? They failed to disclose that they were going in to a Closed Session to discuss illegal Curricular Fees that are being charged to MCPS families.

Only time will tell if the MCPS Board of Education will comply with this decision. At the time of this violation the Board of Education President was Nancy Navarro. Will the current board, led by President Shirley Brandman comply with the closed meeting disclosure requirements of Maryland law?