By Adam Pagnucco.
In the wake of MCPS’s threat to implement layoffs, which rattled the county council and drew fury from the teachers union, tumult in the school system has escalated to mind-boggling levels. As I assess the wreckage, one thought keeps occurring to me: it didn’t have to be this way. Looking for an alternative, I return to my early days of writing which included accounts of a man I once branded the Rogue Superintendent: Jerry Weast.
Jerry Weast explains his budget. Photo from MCPS.
Weast, who served from 1999 through 2011, was a lot of things. Domineering. Intimidating. Shrewd. Secretive. Wily. Ruthless. Charming, at least when it was in his interest. Above all, he was always, always strategic and he is now a legend of Montgomery County. Weast often tangled with county leaders over money, an experience the latter came to dread.
I witnessed two all-out Weast wars. The first was in 2007, when then new-County Executive Ike Leggett committed the sin of not fully funding Weast’s MCPS budget. The second was in 2011, when I was working at the county council and the Great Recession had launched its assault on the county’s finances. There were many smaller skirmishes in between. Weast was an artful bureaucratic general, if a brutal one, and the lessons from his tenure should be learned by MCPS’s leadership of today.
Suppose Weast were in office now and the county executive declined to fund his budget request by $60 million. (That’s what happened this past March.) Here is what he would do.
Step 1: Construct a nightmare scenario and send it to the council in writing. Make it so horrible that no politician would ever want to be blamed for such a catastrophe.
Step 2: Make sure this scenario would get blanket coverage in the press, including the Post’s editorial page. For some reason, Weast exercised a kind of dark witch magic over the Post’s editorial board, which slavishly defended him at every turn.
Step 3: Activate the unions and PTAs and have them swarm the council. I’ll never forget the first time I laid eyes on Weast in person. It was at a 2007 budget hearing in which his union allies were roasting the council. Weast basked in the back, grinning like the Cheshire Cat.
Step 4: Turn up the pressure week after week with letters, calls, emails, petitions and anything else the ground troops could come up with. Weast even threatened to sue the county in 2010. Gather intel. Look for weakness. And slowly, quietly, start to talk to the council members.
Step 5: With the heat at maximum, negotiate a deal. This one thing is critical: keep the allies – especially the unions – informed about the negotiations. Include them in everything. There would be no sandbagging inside the family.
Step 6: Declare victory, even if the county’s surrender is only partial and/or temporary.
Weast’s ability to extract cash from the county was so prodigious that it made MCGEO, the largest non-MCPS union in county government, jealous. In 2010, MCGEO asked council incumbents this in its questionnaire: “Do you admit that Jerry Weast is a better negotiator than you?”
In those days, I was just coming out of a career in which I worked on union organizing campaigns. Weast’s tactics made sense to me. He treated politicians the way I treated union-busting construction contractors. Only now, so many years later, do I appreciate how unusual he was. I have not seen any MCPS superintendent behave like this since.
Now let’s not exaggerate: Weast did not win every battle. (Neither did Napoleon.) The Great Recession finally toppled him from his throne. But Weast won more than he lost, and he was so good at what he did that politicians were reluctant to provoke him. Every dirt-covered kid in the playground understands that win or lose, what’s really important is to impose a painful cost on any other kid who picks a fight with you. That was Jerry Weast.
And what of today?
Let’s assume – purely for the sake of discussion! – that MCPS leadership told the truth about the system’s financial condition in its document about layoffs. Let’s note the fact that MCPS did not have layoffs during the Great Recession, at least to my knowledge, and so it’s amazing that they would be considered now.
MCPS leaders have already made two critical mistakes that Weast would never have made.
First, they forwarded information about their condition to the unions and the council right before passage of the budget. If Weast had such information, he would have used it at least a month before the straw vote. When information is conveyed at such a late hour, it does not allow MCPS leaders to build leverage and negotiate. Indeed, negotiation is impossible. Council Member Evan Glass was right when he stated that the county’s operating budget could not be changed and reconstructed with hours to go before the final vote.
Second, they shocked and alienated labor by blindsiding them with layoffs without working with them to fashion a savings package first. Weast was no union lover; he had roots in right-to-work states like Kansas and North Carolina. But he understood that unions could be force multipliers for his own internal ministry of propaganda. Loyal members of the Weast organization trusted that they would not be double-crossed by the Boss. MCPS leaders, understand this: you will never be power players in county affairs without an alliance with labor.
One final problem awaits. Layoffs are the nuclear option in any budget context. Don’t threaten to push the red button unless you are prepared to do so. MCPS leaders have backed themselves into a corner. If they go through with layoffs, they will shatter any prospects of partnership with their employees. But if they don’t, they will have cried wolf and neither the executive nor the council will believe them next time they get into trouble. Weast didn’t back himself into a corner – instead, he did that to others. But he also gave them a way to get out, pay up and get back into the good graces of the Boss.
I wonder if the existing MCPS regime is slowly coming to an end. After all, the school board is searching for a permanent successor to deposed former Superintendent Monifa McKnight. Any such person will eventually bring in their own management team. Once they do, they would be well advised to clean the slate, build a team of allies and learn the lessons of the Weast wars. Doing so might open the way to renewed greatness at MCPS.