Reply to Montoya is not fit for office

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "Montoya is not fit for office "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You Wootton people are insane. God forbid your dainty children attend school with the plebes. Smdh![/quote]

Maybe take a breath there, please. I'm not a Wootton parent. I was at the meeting. Montoya made divisive racial comments in her prepared remarks. I heard her hot mic comment that referenced the audience (which was mixed, from all across the county - not just Asian Americans from Wootton) as racist.

That's a problem - it's not a good leadership from an elected official. [/quote]

Her prepared remarks said:
[quote]Blair Math and Science, 75%. Polesville Math and Science, 85%. Polesville Ecology, 83%. Polesville Humanities, 73%. Richard Montgomery Interbaccalaureate, 82%. Those are the percentages in those particular programs of only Asian and white students. Those programs, the NEC, the DCC, they were established to make access greater for all students, not just some students. So why do I support the idea of expanding access through a regional program model? Because black and brown students deserve access to these programs as well. So I want to be clear to this community and to all of my colleagues that a vote against this model is a vote to perpetuate the racist access to these programs that has been going on for quite some time. I'll wait. I have heard, I had a lot of talking points prepared today, but let me just go into the crux of it. There have been some really ugly words spoken in really ugly ways throughout this process. In this room, in emails and messages, handwritten letters, in in-person meetings and virtual meetings, in phone calls, at community events. We can disagree. You can even not like me as a person. But it is not okay to speak to myself and my colleagues or any of our future colleagues in disrespectful ways, in threatening ways. It is absolutely not okay to yell at me while my children are standing next to me while I'm in the community. Despite all of that behavior, I pushed it all aside because as an attorney and a trained litigator, I am trained to just see the message. So I looked at your messages, I looked at your data, your charts, your alternative solutions, whatever you gave. I spent hours preparing for some of the meetings that I had with some of you in the community. I can appreciate that some of you wish the data included different data sets. Our data came from municipalities, with our work with Montgomery Planning, from the various vendors that conducted various analyses, whether it was looking at designs or traffic or boundary lines, neighborhoods, populations, projections, enrollments, you name it. It's okay to disagree. It is not okay to treat anybody in this way, including other members of your school communities, other children, other staff. Now I know that these kinds of issues are hard. I'm a parent as well, right? I'm living all of these decisions and I don't always agree with all of them as some of you know, right? My colleagues know too. Because I live them every day just like you do. But we need to be mindful that the ways that we behave and the words that we use, our kids are absolutely hearing them and they are seeing them. They are seeing them and deciding whether they are calm and collaborative or they are aggressive and hostile. Now, I join many of Ms. Wolfe's comments. I have been very disappointed by some of the rhetoric throughout this process. I've been disappointed by the deliberate fueling of misinformation by some of our trusted community leaders. And I've been disappointed at the use of historically significant and racially charged language like segregation, busing and redlining in situations where that is not what's happening. Because when you do that, you dilute the power of those words and the things that were experienced by the black and African American community. As we inch forward into other hard decisions, because we have a lot of hard decisions facing us, my role as a board member, the reason you elected me in this county, was to look at where is the money going, to make sure that we were fiscally sound so that we can all have as much of the things as we want. And that is what I will continue to do and why I support the recommendation of the superintendent. Thank you.
[/quote]

That seems quite reasonable to me.[/quote]

It's not reasonable to call people racist for opposing the dissolution of the NEC and DCC to replace with a yet to be finalized regional model that as currently conceived is likely to reproduce the issues associated with the current system and in some ways make it worse.[/quote]

The prepared remarks didn't call people racist. She said voting to keep the current model would "perpetuate the racist access to these programs."[/quote]

But she’s drawing conclusions using assumptions. She assumes black and brown students do not have access to these programs because of racism. Have there been any actual students who claim, report or feel they would otherwise want to attend these programs but they could not access them due to their race? [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics