Ahead of the Montgomery County Board of Education’s vote Tuesday on a final spending plan for the coming fiscal year, Montgomery County Council President Andrew Friedson (D-Dist. 1) called out the board for “a lack of leadership” in making financial decisions.
“This is a management issue. It’s not a fiscal issue. Rather than be accountable, this idea of using hyperbolic hypothetical scenarios to obfuscate responsibility is not helpful to the public,” Friedson said during a virtual press briefing Monday when asked about whether the school board had been transparent about spending reductions that Montgomery County Public Schools would need to make to close a $30 million budget gap in its fiscal year 2025 budget.
Defense lawyers challenge rulings by former Montgomery County Circuit Judge David Boynton
At least four cases handled by a Maryland judge are being challenged after he presided over a series of hearings and did not reveal he was in talks to accept a job in the office of local prosecutors.
For more than six weeks, according to court documents and recorded proceedings, Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge David Boynton never disclosed he had discussed, negotiated and accepted a position with State’s Attorney John McCarthy’s office as chief of his Felony Trial Division. Boynton started that high-ranking job in February, days after retiring from the bench.
One sentencing in question includes the high-profile case of a Magruder High School student who shot and nearly killed another teen in a bathroom. In that hearing, Boynton ruled from the bench as McCarthy sat in the front row of the gallery.
Defense attorneys say the way Boynton and McCarthy handled the job switchcontradictsMaryland rules designed to promote “public confidence in the independence, integrity, and impartiality of the judiciary.”..
...On Dec. 22, Boynton took up the sentencing of Steven Alston Jr. Nearly a year earlier, the 18-year-old was charged with attempted murder after bringing an untraceable “ghost gun” to Magruder High School and shooting another teen in a boys’ bathroom. As the case progressed, Alston’s defense attorney, David Felsen, discussed with prosecutors a way for Alston to plead guilty and — recognizing his age, cognitive limitations and previously clean criminal record — be sent to a prison program for young offenders, according to court records and hearings. The program typically takes six to seven years to complete.
The attorneys met with Boynton to discuss their plea terms. He then emailed them saying he was willing to impose a sentence “sufficient to allow defendant to complete” the program while maintaining the discretion to sentence Alston to as many as 25 years. The final decision, Boynton wrote, would come after he presided over a sentencing hearing...
On Richard Montgomery High School’s Artificial Turf
Good evening members of the Board of Education and Superintendent Smith. You may remember at the CIP hearings in November a student from Richard
Montgomery who plays on the soccer team as a goalie, Molly Winchenbach. She
testified about the unusual abrasiveness of RM’s new artificial turf field and the
resulting injuries suffered by student athletes. She is my daughter. She would be
here tonight to give you this update and make this plea herself, but she is at practice. High school athletes never seem to have a season off these days.
To MCPS’s credit, after Molly’s testimony, they sent out samples of RM’s and Whitman’s artificial turf for independent testing to a lab in Canada. Both
fields had been installed at the same time using the same organic Zeofill rock/sand mix but their effect on the athletes was drastically different with RM’s field causing substantially more serious abrasion injuries. That different experience of
the athletes was confirmed by the objective tests. Although in my meeting with the Director of Construction and Director of Athletics back in February to go over the results of the tests, I was not permitted to keep a copy, I wrote down the pertinent
results right after the meeting, so my numbers are within a few points. There was agreement in the room that the results were shocking. The abrasiveness of the field
was measured against FIFA’s standard of 30.
Old crumb rubber fields tested a 3.
Whitman’s field tested a 20. RM’s field tested 128! Four times the FIFA standard! The lab tests also figured out why – the volcanic rock particles used in the RM field Zeofill were much larger than those used at Whitman, and at RM, the rock was layered with the sand like a cake, rather than all mixed together, as it was at Whitman.
Now that MCPS has verified what we have been saying all along – there is
something very wrong with the RM turf – it is so abrasive, it is tearing the skin off the athletes, what are you going to do about it? MCPS thought that perhaps they
had solved the problem for this spring. They had removed some of the fill and
tried to mix up the layers more by deep tining it. The plan then was to just replace
the offending larger particle fill with the smaller particle fill gradually with regular
monthly maintenance. But, I’m here to tell you, on behalf of my daughter and the
other student athletes who are using and will be using this field in the fall
regularly, that MCPS’s remediation plan is not aggressive enough. I’ve provided
you with a picture of what happened to Molly’s leg the first time she slid on the
turf this spring to stop a ball coming into the goal. The RM turf scraped off the top layer of about 6 inches of her skin. This cannot be the conditions under which you
expect student athletes to play. While all athletes may not experience the
abrasiveness of the RM field the same, it is particularly damaging to the students,
like Molly in positions, like goalie, who have to slide on the turf all the time. She
plays on turf all over the county, both indoor and outdoor, and only receives
serious injuries like this from the RM turf.
I understand that MCPS is in the process of asking the manufacturer of the
turf how much it will cost to replace all or most of the fill in RM’s turf all at once
over the summer. I am asking you to ensure this remediation gets done
immediately. (And any cost should not come out of CIP funds already allocated
to capital expenditures for RM, which needs substantial expansion over the
summer just to keep up with its ever growing student population.) You owe it to
the students whose health and safety you say are your top priority. You now know this turf is 4x the standard for abrasiveness, you know the reasons why it is so abrasive, and you know what you need to do to fix it. Don’t waste anymore time while more students get hurt. Do it now.
Thank you.
may remember at the CIP hearings in November a student from Richard 