Reply to Council hearing on MCPS

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Thursday at 3 PM. The Council's hearing staff is a former MCPS administrator.  Why can't the Council find someone who didn't work for MCPS to run the hearing? [/quote]

Committee hearings are run by the County Council member who is chair of the committee. Kate Stewart is chair of the audit committee. Will Jawando is chair of the education and culture committee.[/quote]

And a former MCPS associate superintendent put together the packet for the hearing and runs the discussion.

ESSIE MCGUIRE [/quote]

Yes, she's COUNCIL STAFF.[/quote]

And was high-level MCPS staff before. We'll have to see if she utilizes that insider experience to shine light on the issues or to cover them up.  My guess, with her being a political operator, would be a targeted amount of the former and lots of the latter.  Nice for the council to have plenty of $ not only for their own salaries, but for a relative host of staff, who don't exactly make a pittance.

MCPS has those positions, too, but not the [b]BOE, who rely pretty mich entirely on thoae reporting to the Superintendent and whose compensation accounts for less than 10 hours a week for a skill set that we might hope to be, at a minimum, on the level of a mid-level financial analyst or an assistant school principal.  Maybe 3-4 hours a week if you want a principal-level equivalent.[/b][/quote]

Should be an education and experience requirement to run for Board. At least a Bachelor's if not a grad/professional (e.g. JD) degree plus some years of relevant work experience. Anyone know if MCPS is a bully towards the BOE? Is that the reason the BOE members do not ask questions or press back when given crap info from MCPS? Who here can answer this honestly? [/quote]

BOE members are told not to bother MCPS staff. That from multiple BOE members.[/quote]

That don’t have to bother staff.  They just need to send notice to the Super of the information they want and when. The Super can then bother whatever staff they want in order to deliver what is requested by the BOE.  Since it’s their performance that will be evaluated.[/quote]

Evaluated by the Superintendent and/or those under that person.  Who have many objectives for those folks besides responsiveness to BOE inquiry.  Some of which may be [i]in conflict[/i] with that elected oversight body or the legitimate inquiry aims of individual board members.

So things get hidden in glossed-over presentations, dragged out, etc., with the filtering bottleneck of upper MCPS management.  If you [i]do[/i] contact MCPS staff who are not at the top, say to try to get some info to support public testimony, some hint strongly towards presenting the issue a certain way in the hopes that it gets the BOE to ask a follow-up precise enough for the upper administration to have to let [i]real[/i] info through -- the kind that might not lead to a rubber-stamp BOE approval.

And that kind of info, if it ever does see the light of day, typically is provided weeks or months later, not at the time of discussion and with no opportunity for verbal back-and-forth to support nuanced understanding for a BOE decision, unless yet later put on a meeting agenda, perhaps.

Compounding that, there are, sometimes, outright lies in the verbal responses that upper management provides to the board when a follow-up question is asked.  Curriculum comes to mind.  If the BOE can't go directly to the specialist who knows the answer more directly than the executive responding, how are they supposed to call these out?

That's not to say that the MCPS initiatives are all wrong, but the lack of sunlight that would allow effective stakeholder input and nuanced BOE direction is problematic, and the way it is set up to make that the default is just disgusting.

If they are acceding to no-direct-inquiry rules pushed by MCPS, the BOE's majority has, pretty much, abandoned their obligation to the community.  I can hope the composition of the board shifts, but I'm not sure if the seats of enough of those who tend to rubber stamp are up for election this year.[/quote]

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