By Adam Pagnucco.
At his weekly media briefing yesterday, County Executive Marc Elrich addressed ongoing controversies at MCPS. After repeating his concerns about the initial summary report of MCPS’s sexual harassment investigation, Elrich responded to a question from Fox 5’s Tom Fitzgerald about the school board’s refusal to answer press questions. I reprint their exchange below and then I’ll give my take.
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Fitzgerald: Good afternoon county executive, I want to return to your comments regarding the MCPS board. There’s going to be their first public business meeting today since the release of their summary on Friday. You had issued a statement saying that you had some deeply troubling questions about that. You just elaborated on just now.
The superintendent works for the Board of Education. They hire her. Members of the Board of Education are elected public officials. To a person, they have all declined answering press questions about this.
And I’m curious from your viewpoint. You’re a public official who every week answers our questions whether you like them or not and whether or not sometimes the public likes your answers or not. Do you have any viewpoint on the continued non-answering of questions about this issue from the Board of Education members?
Elrich: I mean, I just think it’s troubling because, you know, because it’s troubling to everybody else. And I frankly don’t think these questions are too hard to answer.
Nobody is asking anybody to opine on whether or not somebody is guilty. You can make an argument that, you know, these are allegations and we don’t know what the investigation showed. But to do simple things like say yes, there ought to be an investigation, there ought to be consequences if we find that people, you know, in the administration, in the school system covered things up or weren’t forthcoming…
To not express some kind of concern that this isn’t out there or that they’ve been put in this position, I don’t understand. They’re put in a position where they are defending, they have to defend something which they don’t need to defend. They should say we need an open, healthy inquiry. And no one’s going to ask them to assign guilt. I’m not assigning guilt to anybody. But you ought to know what happened. And you ought to know why you weren’t given that kind of information. And I don’t think it’s that hard to say.
Like you said, I answer your hard questions every week.
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As Fitzgerald said, school board members are elected officials and they hold a lot of power over MCPS, including the superintendent. Elected office comes with expectations. We expect elected officials to offer their opinions on matters within their purview. We expect them to answer questions from the press and the public. We expect them to perform constituent service. We expect them to exercise public oversight of government bodies for which they are responsible. That’s what being an elected official is all about.
It’s time for our school board members to act like elected officials. Talk to us, the voters. What do you think about what happened with the promotion of former principal Joel Beidleman and what MCPS must do now to improve? If any individual board member has a statement about that, I will be happy to print it.
Otherwise, if the school board members won’t speak, the voters will. The ballot box awaits.