Capital Improvement Insincerity
Between the County Council and Potomac parents, it's amazing Thomas Taylor hasn't completely lost his mind yet.
We interrupt our scheduled review of MSDE's new Strategic Plan1 to highlight the hypocrisy unfolding in Montgomery County. I've written before about the poor state of the buildings in MCPS. Yet twice in the last week, MoCo residents and politicians have resisted plans to actually fix the problem because doing so hurts their feewings somehow.
Background
County school infrastructure is a mess, and our Superintendent, Dr. Thomas Taylor, has put forward an ambitious plan to get the County's schools back into shape by asking the County Council for several billion dollars this year and over the next several years to try to remediate decades of under-funding that has led to a significant number of school facilities to be unsafe and/or unhealthy. Some of this has involved recommending certain schools be closed permanently, while other proposals have looked for ways to fix or remediate school facility issues.
The County Council
I've written before about my problems with the County Council and the way schools are funded in Maryland.2 This week's nonsense just adds to the list of reasons why I believe the County Council as a whole resents having to fund what parents clearly believe is just free babysitting for their children. The schools are falling apart, but you have council members like Andrew Friedson calling for “transparency” when the current superintendent’s Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) budget is the most transparent in my 20+ years of working for MCPS. They balk at the billions of dollars that it will take to fix up schools but then complain when mold is discovered or faulty sprinkler system causes a school to be evacuated in the middle of December.
Frankly, the posturing of different members of the council to align for their run for County Executive is indicative of exactly how we can expect each of them to govern if elected to replace Marc Elrich in November. Friedson hates spending money on schools, Will Jawando seems to be a decent ally of the school system (which is probably why he earned MCEA’s endorsement in December), and Evan Glass seems to be trying on different hats to figure out which one actually fits.3
Nonetheless, it’s clear that members of the County Council, whether they are running for County Executive or not, enjoy complaining about spending money, refuse to raise taxes on MoCo’s wealthy residents when it is obviously necessary, and seem to enjoy pretending that MCPS isn’t one of the key economic drivers of the county.
Potomac Parents
But what really gets me upset is when parents rightly complain about their kids’ schools being run-down… and then complain when a solution is proposed that isn’t exactly what they want.
Am I a fan of MCPS Superintendent Thomas Taylor’s plan to move Wootton High School to the facility that was supposed to be a brand-new high school? Not really. But is Dr. Taylor’s logic sound? Absolutely. The school system is undergoing a rapid demographic shift downward thanks to a variety of factors,4 and two brand-new schools in 2027 isn’t really as necessary as it was when the Woodward and Crown projects were envisioned. So it doesn’t really matter that I have a child that, under most of the proposed redistricting models would have been in the first 9th grade class to start at Crown, because that isn’t what the county needs right now. I know that my child will get a decent education, no matter which MCPS high school they go to.
So when the Potomac parents of current Wootton students complain, it isn’t because they’re afraid that their children might receive an inferior education. They claim to want to “keep the Wootton cluster together.” Let’s take a look at what that means, really.
And now, let’s take a look at the racial makeup of MCPS as a whole:
Let’s also take a look at the 20.2% of students at Wootton HS that have ever qualified for FARMS versus the district’s overall rate of 55.5%
In other words, the community that Wootton’s parents want to “keep together” is significantly Whiter and more Asian, significantly less Hispanic and Black, and much richer than the county as a whole.
Is it possible that this is just the same knee-jerk reaction to not wanting to see their school close? Of course. When Taylor announced that Silver Spring International Middle School (SSIMS) would close in 2029, the community legitimately was concerned about the loss of community.
However, with Wootton, it’s hard to ignore that you have a bunch of white, wealthy Potomac parents who don’t want their kids to go to school in areas that are largely not-white and not-wealthy. Historically, this was the same demographic that pulled their kids out of public schools after Brown v. Board of Education and who fled the inner city after World War II. These are people that clutch their pearls at the sight of a group of non-white teenagers but proclaim that they are not racist because they don’t say overtly racist things. You know, the “white moderates” that Martin Luther King excoriated in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail.5
Where do we go from here?
Great question. I may not love Dr. Taylor’s plan for MCPS’s redistricting or program realignment, but I have to admit that he has a plan based in logic that has a high chance for success if implemented correctly. He is taking into account the declining school system enrollment and attempting to fix decades of neglect to the school system’s aging infrastructure. I just hope that the politicians and Potomac holier-than-thous don’t force him to change horses midstream.
If you want to catch up, here are parts 1-4.
And since I know at least one of my regular readers will ask me why I didn’t talk about Mithun Banerjee in this paragraph… here’s the reference you’re looking for!
See also: White Fragility, How to be Anti-Racist, or any other “woke” book that acknowledges that racism exists and that you need to do more than just say you aren’t racist in order to be anti-racist.