8 Schools: Former Montgomery County school aide charged with abuse of 7-year-old

Police have accused a former school aide in Maryland of sexually abusing a female student who as a second-grader allegedly searched for candy in the aide’s pants pocket and touched his genitals.

Hector Hermes Lagos Toro, 58, was arrested and charged with sexual abuse of a minor and a third degree-sex offense for the alleged conduct at Stedwick Elementary School — the latest in a line of onetime Montgomery County school system employees accused of inappropriate contact with students.

Toro, who worked for the Montgomery County school system for more than a decade as a classroom aide and lunch-hour assistant, left the system in 2012 and is a longtime Spanish-language teacher at extracurricular foreign language programs across the county...

...Most recently, Toro worked as a Spanish-language instructor for before- and after-school foreign language programs run out of county elementary schools — one called FLES and the other, Foreign Language for Kids.

Since 2000, he worked with the FLES program operated by Big Learning, which was created by Montgomery’s countywide council of PTAs. This school year, he taught with FLES at Potomac Elementary and at Thurgood Marshall Elementary and Whetstone Elementary, both in Gaithersburg.

Since 2015, he also worked for Foreign Language for Kids, an educational company in Potomac, through which he taught at schools including Wilson Wims Elementary in Clarksburg, Carderock Springs Elementary in Bethesda and Seven Locks Elementary in Potomac.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/former-montgomery-county-school-aide-charged-with-abuse-of-7-year-old/2018/04/03/e41cc566-36cb-11e8-8fd2-49fe3c675a89_story.html?utm_term=.6ed2bf861512

MCPS COO Zuckerman Surprises Parents, Skips Promised Design Meeting

According to parents, the introduction of the Preliminary Plans for the modernization (insert new MCPS name for construction here - Rev/Ex) of Potomac Elementary School is being presented to the Board of Education (BOE) tomorrow without the promised community meeting to "review the conceptual design elements of this approach."  

MCPS Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Zuckerman, has apparently communicated to parents that there would be an additional meeting to review the plans.  

The last design meeting was held January 24, 2017.  At that point, parents report that no modifications had been made to the plans presented at the December 19, 2016, meeting nor the January 18, 2017, meeting.  At these previous meetings, parents made multiple suggestions as to how each of the proposed designs could be improved.  

There was apparently no final presentation to the Potomac Elementary School PTA and community so that everyone would know what would be put before the BOE for approval. 

Tomorrow's presentation could well be a surprise for parents and neighbors. 

This is not the first time we have seen MCPS COO Andrew Zuckerman throw parents under the bus.  Remember when he ditched the entire Child Abuse and Neglect Work Group to write his own "report" with another administrator on MCPS' handling of the sexual abuse of students by staff?  

Why do MCPS administrators front that they are working with parents, then stop communicating with them, and then write their own reports, thus leaving out actual parent and community input?

The bigger question is, why do our elected Board of Education members fall for this over and over again?  

Atlanta Educators Convicted in School Cheating Scandal

ATLANTA — In a dramatic conclusion to what has been described as the largest cheating scandal in the nation’s history, a jury here on Wednesday convicted 11 educators for their roles in a standardized test cheating scandal that tarnished a major school district’s reputation and raised broader questions about the role of high-stakes testing in American schools.

On their eighth day of deliberations, the jurors convicted 11 of the 12 defendants of racketeering, a felony that carries up to 20 years in prison. Many of the defendants — a mixture of Atlanta public school teachers, testing coordinators and administrators — were also convicted of other charges, such as making false statements, that could add years to their sentences.

Judge Jerry W. Baxter of Fulton County Superior Court ordered most of the educators jailed immediately, and they were led from the courtroom in handcuffs. Judge Baxter, who presided over a trial that began with opening statements more than six months ago, will begin sentencing hearings next week....

 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/02/us/verdict-reached-in-atlanta-school-testing-trial.html

Starr Talks Curriculum, Brickyard Farm, Rock Creek Hills Park

Starr quotes from Bethesda meeting:

...“We’ve not determined what we’re going to do with it. There’s no excess space to be had in the county. We need schools and we need sites for schools,” Starr said. “People want ballfields and tennis courts and a whole bunch of things and I’m not prepared at this time to commit any parcel of land to anything outside of a school purpose, if it is deemed appropriate it should be used for that purpose.”...

...We are the first district to get to the Moon, now we have to get to Mars.”

 http://www.bethesdanow.com/2013/07/16/starr-talks-curriculum-brickyard-farm-rock-creek-hills-park/

Brickyard Middle School Site Being Considered for Actual School

This is new.  The Brickyard Middle School site in Potomac is being considered by MCPS for use as an actual MCPS school.

The notice below has gone out from MCPS announcing that the 20 acre Brickyard Middle School site is now under consideration as a possible new location for Potomac Elementary School.

Potomac Elementary School was currently going through its most recent Feasibility Study (past Feasibility Study addition projects were never built) and apparently the Brickyard Middle School site has come up as a possible new location.  The Potomac Elementary School Feasibility Study meeting dates have been extended and new meetings have been added.  Below is the recent announcement from MCPS.

  2013 Brickyard for Pes by Parents' Coalition of Montgomery County, Maryland

The Baltimore Sun: Cheating, tampering found in city schools

Officials to announce extensive violations Thursday

...The disclosure marks the second time in little more than a year that city school officials have had to acknowledge cheating at schools recognized nationally as models of successful urban education, including one visited by the first lady and the other by the U.S. secretary of education...

Some corruption comes with rising test scores

Berliner: Why Rising Test Scores May Not Mean Increased Learning

The Washington Post's The Answer Sheet asked prominent researcher and educational psychologist David Berliner of Arizona State University to explain why rising standardized test scores may not mean that students have learned anything.

Here is an excerpt from the answer:

Conclusion: It is likely that there will always be some corruption associated with the people and the tests used to assess learning when so much pressure is on administrators and teachers to increase test scores.

This means that when scores do go up, we need to be wary. We need to investigate whether the rise in test scores is a real indicator of greater learning or some form of deception.

Unfortunately research suggests that deception and cheating in contemporary American culture, including our schools, has become more acceptable.

Newsweek on MCPS - What Happens When Role Models Teach Dishonesty

Superintendent Jerry Weast's first year in Montgomery County was not his first year as a Superintendent. When he arrived at MCPS he had been a Superintendent for over 20 years.

With all of that experience, how did he handle a major cheating scandal at the end of his first year here? Read the Newsweek article that detailed how he handled the crisis, and how the students involved were treated.

Newsweek - Bitter Lessons: The Kids Were The Heroes In The Scandal At Potomac Elementary. What Happens When Role Models Teach Dishonesty

By EVAN THOMAS AND PAT WINGERT | NEWSWEEK

The first hints of something wrong at Potomac Elementary came from the kids. Whispering to one another in the hallways and on the playground, then telling their parents after school, a few fifth graders began describing the peculiar behavior of their principal...

...But on a deeper level, the Potomac scandal is a morality play with a disturbing twist: the heroes were the children who had the courage to question the ethics of the very people who were supposed to be teaching them the values of honesty and integrity...

...The kids were bothered and confused. "Some kids were saying to each other, 'I don't think she's allowed to do that'," one fifth grader told NEWSWEEK. The student, a 10-year-old boy, recounted that he was given extra time on the math test...

...In their public pronouncements, school-district administrators [Blog Note: The MCPS Superintendent was Jerry Weast] seemed more embarrassed by the negative publicity than ashamed of the cheating. The school appeared to approach the incident more as an exercise in damage control than as an opportunity to teach right from wrong...

...They weren't always on top. In 1998 Potomac finished a mere seventh in the county on the MSPAP. In the fall of 1999 Montgomery's new school superintendent, Jerry Weast, prepared a "productivity map" showing how each of the county's schools scored. He told newspaper reporters that the map would help him identify and weed out principals whose schools were performing poorly. Potomac Elementary was rated "less productive" because its scores had leveled off in recent years. A few months later, when the 1999 MSPAP results came out, Potomac had vault-ed to No. 1...