Board of Education Meeting Recap - November 10, 2020

by David King

On Tuesday, November 10th, the Board met for seven-plus hours to discuss a variety of topics. They refreshed, updated, and tentatively approved their plan for a hybrid reopening, discussed student mental health in virtual learning and beyond, began amending Policy IQD-- academic eligibility for extracurricular activities, approved their stance on annual legislative policies for county and state lawmakers, undertook a re-imagining of the MCPS Office of Human Resources and Development, renamed Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School, and officially began their anti-racism system audit by awarding a contract to the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium. In addition, they gave a tearful farewell to Board Member Jeanette Dixon (at-large), who took place in the final meeting of her 4-year term and will be replaced by Lynne Harris in December.

Author’s note: in the interest of not dragging out this summary of what could well be the longest Board meeting of the year, an effort was made to cut down on the amount of unnecessary detail included in each section of this article.

Public Comment

Fourteen people testified to the Board this week. Surprisingly, almost all of them argued for the same thing-- a stark contrast from the tradition of public comments being disorganized, klutzy, and nonsensical. Students from all levels of school and all parts of the county testified on the pressing need to bring students back into in-person learning as soon as possible, citing the immense toll that online learning has taken on students’ mental and emotional health. Alongside them, parents, staffers, and several doctors - including a pediatrician, a cardiologist with a master’s degree in public health, an orthodontist, an opthamologist, and a psychologist - all argued that a return to school can be done safely, that the health risks outweigh the psychological and physical damage that the community is suffering during virtual learning, and that MCPS needs to change the metrics for reopening (which they believe to be unnecessarily difficult to attain) that Montgomery County Health Officer Travis Gayles put in place, so students can return to schools as quickly as possible. These arguments for an immediate return to in-person learning come just days after MCPS unveiled their tentative plan for hybrid reopening, and are largely fueled by a sense of fear in the community regarding our relationship with the COVID metrics required for returning - we already don’t meet them, and the situation is trending worse.

Additionally, there were a few testimonies submitted on other topics. Montgomery Blair senior Anika Seth testified about recent amendments to Board Policy ACF, sexual harassment, which the Board temporarily suspended on September 22nd to update it. Seth argued that, although MCPS has to comply with new federal guidelines, they need to do everything in their power to increase protections for students who are attempting to come forward and report sexual harassment within this new system. Walter Johnson senior David King testified yet again on the Board’s failure to alter the grading system and protect student mental health, calling on them to change both of these immediately and to continue to care for students enrolled in virtual learning even as they discuss reopening. And finally Lisa Menter, an MCPS parent who neglected to mention that she is also an MCPS teacher, talked about how wonderful virtual learning has been for her son.

Updates to COVID-19 Metrics and Tentative Action on Hybrid Reopening Model

To start, MCPS launched their new COVID-19 metrics dashboard, which shows that the state of the virus in Montgomery County is dire and worsening. Patricia O’Neill (District 3) asked the Superintendent’s office to consider putting together a task force of doctors and other health officials for advisory purposes. Noting that our county is a large one,  Superintendent Jack Smith confirmed that there is a possibility of the county as a whole reopening for hybrid learning while some schools in COVID-dense areas remained closed. However, since our modeling for a safe reopening is based on county numbers as a whole, Dr. Smith indicated that the county is highly unlikely to open only a few schools if reopening the county as a whole is impossible.

The Superintendent’s office also briefly touched on the models for reopening: the support model, based around mostly virtual learning with special groups going into school, the simultaneous instruction model, in which teachers attempt to teach both in-person and virtually at the same time, and the direct instruction model, where in-person learning is the basis of a system supplemented by virtual instruction. Their office is also developing an all-virtual model, which appears at this point to be the most likely outcome (though neither the Board nor the Superintendent has said so). Finally, at the request of Nick Asante (Student Member) and Rebecca Smondrowski (District 2), the model for a phased-in reopening at the high school level has been altered slightly. Students from all grades who are no longer on track for graduation are now in Phase 1, 11th and 12th graders in Phase 2, and 9th and 10th graders in Phase 3.

The Board voted unanimously to tentatively approve this plan, meaning it can move forward in its development. It will be up for a final action vote in December.

Update to Virtual Learning - Socioemotional Well-Being

In light of a recent survey that suggested some 40% or more of MCPS students have had their mental health negatively impacted by virtual learning in a serious way, the Board heard updates on the plans of MCPS to care for the socioemotional needs of students. They were informed that school psychologists (which every school is required by policy to have) have been working hard to develop plans that recognize which students need help, reach out to them, and set them up in one-on-one school counseling appointments or refer them to mental health professionals. Additionally, schools are giving social-emotional learning lessons, hoping to teach students how to care for themselves. However, many students, parents, and community members do not believe that these measures go nearly far enough to protect the mental health of students.

Tentative Action, Policy IQD, Academic Eligibility for Extracurricular Activities

The Board moved to tentatively amend Policy IQD to allow for public comment and Board discussion on the policy. The goals of updating it are twofold: first, they would change the period of time for which a freshman’s eligibility is independent of their grades. Currently, freshmen enter MCPS with a “clean slate” for eligibility that lasts through the first marking period, after which point they must sustain a GPA of 2.0 or higher. In the update, they seek to extend this clean slate through the third marking period, using fourth quarter grades to determine eligibility for sophomore year extracurriculars. Second, they hope to eliminate the academic requirement for all extracurriculars excluding interscholastic sports, which are required to have this restriction by the state of Maryland. Both of these updates are done in the name of equity, since FARMs students and students of color find themselves ineligible at disproportionately high rates.

Annual Legislative Priorities

The Board unanimously approved their annual legislative policies, which are not their framework for the year but rather their official positions on policies for State and County legislators. Though nothing much has changed from recent years in these policies, they generally revolve around expanding equity for students and maintaining their high level of autonomy from government oversight.

Reimagination of the Office of Human Resources and Development

MCPS is reimagining their Office of Human Resources and Development after several central office work sessions involving members of the MCPS community. They emphasize a few different points. First, they want to make MCPS staff more diverse through active hiring decisions to find employees who fit their ideals, and they want to establish a better MCPS-student-to-workforce pipeline. Second, they want to establish more of a staff community, making sure all employees feel welcomed, and ensuring they know what they’re doing. Third, they want to consolidate and expand the resources they provide to teachers for professional learning and development, creating districtwide learning progressions and developing a cohort for future administrators. Finally, they are implementing an exit survey for all staff leaving and attempting to create better resources to retain staff. Ultimately, through all of these points of emphasis they hope to develop and retain a more diverse workforce, especially including as many former MCPS students as possible.

Renaming of Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School

After a year-long process of determining community interest in the renaming of the school and developing a list of names through community feedback as possible replacement, the Board voted today to remove the name of noted segregationist Col. E. Brooke Lee from the Wheaton-area middle school. The community of the area provided two names to add to a list of the Board’s four ideas already in place, and they ranked them in order of preference. The community’s first choice was to name the school after Dolores Huerta, fueled in no small part by the demographics of the area, which put the percentage of students enrolled at the school at 62.6% Hispanic for the 2019-2020 school year. However, the Board instead approved the name Odessa Shannon, which was third on the community’s list. Shannon was the Board’s first African-American female member, and she passed away this May.

Award of Contract - Antiracist System Audit Consultant

The Board awarded a contract not to exceed $454,680 to the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium so that they could conduct a long-overdue antiracist system audit for MCPS. They are to prioritize the following areas: workforce diversity, work conditions, K–12 curriculum review, equity achievement framework progress, community relations and engagement, and evaluation of school cultures. This audit will last one year, and several board members were reassured by the Superintendent that this audit will result in significant change within the MCPS system. Rebecca Smondrowski (District 2), who has taken criticism in the past for her vote against the boundary analysis study (believed by many to help eliminate segregation in MCPS), was not present for the vote: on vacation, she disappeared about halfway through the meeting.

Farewell to Jeanette Dixon

After a long career in MCPS as a social studies teacher, a principal at multiple schools including Paint Branch High School, and four years as an at-large member of the Board of Education, Jeanette Dixon gave a tearful farewell and reflection at her last ever Board meeting. A champion for the students, Dixon has spent her term working to eliminate inequality for students and has passed many resolutions that have increased equity for students, staff, and the community as a whole. She asked that the Board continue to work in her spirit, making specific recommendations that the Board make itself more accessible to staffers and that they continue with the boundary study (among several other points, of which she made twelve). Her spirit of joy, energy, and passion will be sorely missed at the Board table. Lynne Harris will fill her seat on December first.

Election Results

Rebecca Smondrowski (incumbent, District 2) and Shebra Evans (incumbent President, District 4) both handedly won re-election to the board. Meanwhile, in a somewhat closer at-large race, Lynne Harris beat Sunil Dasgupta, riding largely on the momentum given to her by an incredibly passionate team of mostly-student volunteers.

The Board will conduct its next business meeting on Thursday, December 3rd. Signups for public comment can be found at this link; they will open on Wednesday, November 25th and run through Friday, November 27th.