By Adam Pagnucco.
Right before the school board passed its budget adjustment package yesterday, which avoided earlier predictions of potential layoffs, Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) President Jennifer Martin upbraided the board for being “polite and meek” in its dealings with county government officials. That was not welcomed by some board members, two of whom pushed back directly.
Let’s start with Martin, who lit into the board during the public comments section of its meeting. Here is what she had to say about them as well as county leaders.
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MCEA President Jennifer Martin.
Yesterday, over 100 MCEA educators, parents, students and community members gathered in Downtown Silver Spring to draw public attention to the serious underfunding we’re facing for next year. We were there to draw that attention. The council’s failure to honor this board’s bare bones budget request and your lack of passionate advocacy on behalf of our students has led to anger and fear about our working and learning conditions in the year ahead. Hundreds of us are facing involuntary transfers and hundreds of new teachers’ contracts are at risk.
We realize that among elected leaders we have few, if any, effective champions for education. While all of you on the board say you care about schools and the souls who work and learn here, where is the courage of your convictions? When are you going to speak forcefully and act with decisiveness in seeking resources we desperately need? It’s not easy for us to fight on the streets as we did but we are frustrated by the empty words and dismissiveness we receive from our elected leaders.
We educators can’t save the school system by ourselves. Right now, all the good things that happen in our classrooms and school buildings each day seem to happen in spite of rather than because of MCPS and county leadership.
In the year ahead, MCEA will continue to fight to restore the excellence of our schools. We need you to be there with us. Now is not the time to be polite and meek. Stand up to county leaders and demand from them what our students need and deserve.
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That drew a response from Board of Education Member Shebra Evans, who was once endorsed by MCEA but is now facing a union-backed challenger in this year’s election.
Board of Education Member Shebra Evans.
Evans replied, “To Ms. Martin, this is what I’ll say. So we talk one on one in groups about how we feel and we advocate to the county council… so this is what I’m not going to do. I am not going to blame the county council on decisions that we have to make because they have various agencies that they have to fund as well. So we know there’s a limited amount of funding, right?”
Evans went on: “I just took – and I’ll say this – I have very thick skin. I took a little offense that as a board member, I’m not doing my job. At every turn, I’m doing my job… We do our work to ensure that the students can walk across the stage to do whatever it is that they desire to do. That is the goal of everybody up here. That is our goal. And so to think that we are perceived as not doing our job? We’re doing it. Alright? We’re doing it. But guess what? We can always partner and do better and work more together.”
Other board members associated themselves with Evans’s remarks. Brenda Wolff said, “Like Ms. Evans, I’m a little bit disturbed by the testimony of the union because I believe that we have done everything to make it known what we needed in order to run the school system. In fact, we haven’t backed down from our original request. But they have decided what they wanted to give us and we do understand that there are several competing interests that they have. And so we have made the best decisions that we could make with what we have.”
A last point. Board of Education Member Rebecca Smondrowski (who was just defeated in the primary election) said she would like to advocate that the board ask the county council for a supplemental appropriation after July 1 for FY25. That drew cheers from the crowd.
So the showdowns may have just begun.