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[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]

Rita apparently doesn't know the reason that the magnet program, and the Communications Arts Program, were formed at Blair HS. Back in the 1980s, Blair had the poorest academic outcomes in the county. There was talk of closing the school. The magnet and CAP programs were started to attract students with higher academic outcomes, to improve the school, and it worked. Rita, do you like high academic achievement? Most parents do. Blair achieved greater racial integration, a good thing. These two programs lifted the entire school into one that made people move to the Blair area, so that they could go to a good school. Now that you have helped diminish the magnet program into something that will be far less rigorous, west county students will likely not travel east from west county (west county, which was left virtually untouched by all these regional changes), you have helped to further segregate the county. Congratulations Rita.

And if you think you were elected to make the hard decisions, the fiscally sound decisions, you are wrong. You ran for office, as a neophyte, because your medical marijuana legal practice was going nowhere, and you smelled opportunity because of a vulnerable board of education. You won, because BOE member Lynne Harris, viewed as a supporter of Monifa McKnight, having voted to make her superintendent, was vulnerable. You won, because you were not Lynne Harris, and the teachers' union, unwisely, endorsed you, and its members worked every precinct to pass out your name on their endorsement literature.

It is ridiculous that you are claiming to make fiscally sound decisions. There is virtually no budgetary information available on this ambitious regional programming scheme. Regional programs' curriculum will be cut-and-paste operations, amounting to academic mush, and the transportation costs will be far higher than the school district can afford to pay. This regional operation will collapse into chaos. You think you are the champion of BIPOC students? If you want to improve academic outcomes of students, you should have advised the superintendent that he should start at the preK and ES levels. But what do you know?[/quote]

“medical marijuana legal practice”
What?

[/quote]

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