By Adam Pagnucco.
MCPS’s hiring of Stafford County Public Schools Superintendent Thomas Taylor has been brewing for a while. As it became clear that Taylor was the choice, my sources began asking whether he was ready for MCPS. After all, the Stafford school district is much smaller than MCPS. So to answer their question, let’s do what we do here and pull some data.
The table below shows some basic financial and enrollment data for the two districts. (Taylor was hired in Stafford in November 2021.) This very rough cut was assembled from Stafford’s FY25 budget and summary, school list and profile document and MCPS’s FY25 interim superintendent memo, FY25 requested budget and schools at a glance summary. The MCPS full-time equivalent position count is an estimate based on the county council’s budget action.
Depending on which stat you compare, MCPS is 5 to 7 times larger than Stafford. Taylor is going to need a lot of help to tame the unruly beast that the MCPS empire can occasionally act like and he does not have much time to build a management team. There is also the matter of the politicians here, whose private unhappiness with MCPS’s recent problems exceeds their oft-stated public discontent.
Now look at the demographics. Stafford schools are diverse with more than a passing resemblance to MCPS. In fact, you could almost say that Stafford is a mini-MCPS. Taylor is no stranger to dealing with the needs of a district with lots of students of color, economically disadvantaged students and English language learners. Just looking at this data, I bet there are big differences between Stafford schools just as there are big differences inside MCPS.
One huge difference is the nature of the two districts’ unions. Stafford has a branch of the same parent union (National Education Association) that the Montgomery County Education Association has. But collective bargaining of state and local employees has been allowed only since state law was changed in 2021. Fairfax County’s school employees just formed a bargaining unit last week. I don’t know if any public school districts in Virginia have collective bargaining agreements yet.
MCPS, however, has had collective bargaining for decades and its three unions (MCEA, SEIU Local 500 and the administrators) are skilled, powerful, and politically influential. MCPS Superintendent Jerry Weast (1999-2011) was successful in large part because of his close working relationship with labor. More recent superintendents have seen their effectiveness limited by labor conflict. Taylor’s dealings with labor and collective bargaining agreements, an area that was much less relevant to his work in Virginia, are going to be a critical factor in his work going forward.
You can make a case that MCPS superintendent is the toughest job in Montgomery County. That has become even more true with the system’s recent problems, budgetary and otherwise. Taylor is an education veteran having started out as a K-12 contracted substitute teacher in Chesapeake, Virginia 24 years ago. Montgomery County cannot be strong without a strong MCPS.
Let’s find out if Thomas Taylor is the superintendent we deserve.