MoCo delegates Lorig Charkoudian and Joel Vogel have introduced MC 7-25, which provides for the following: a) MCPS Board of Education members get pay raises to $124,000/year starting December 2026 from the current $25,000/year (BoE president gets $10,000 more); b) the student member of the board is entitled to 80% of that $124,000 to be used as a scholarship.
This is atrocious, shameless, unethical, and yet another sign of the nepotism and corruption so prevalent at MCPS. It’s yet another sign that progressives take so much and give it to so few. That’s the executive summary, now let’s get to the details.
Charkoudian and Vogel didn’t invent this legislation all by themselves. It officially started in 2018 when the MoCo delegation in Annapolis established a Montgomery County Board of Education Compensation Commission to study the matter of BoE members’ salaries. Among the many officials providing input into that study were Shebra Evans, Patricia O’Neill, Rebecca Smondrowski, and Karla Silvestre—all BoE members at that time, so at the outset we have a problem with conflict of interest. Regardless, that commission’s 2019 report came to the conclusion that the BoE members/president are entitled to inflation-adjusted $60,000/$70,000 salaries. This compensation reflects the time required by BoE members to execute their required duties.
Here we are five years later since that 2019 report, and Charkoudian and Vogel feel the board members should be paid $64,000 more! How has their workload or responsibility increased in those five years that justified such an increase? The only hint I found was the term oversight that came out of the Biedelman scandal. Presumably the board members will need to do additional oversight to address harassment as soon as it is reported. We’ll address this nonsense in the next installment of this series.
This nepotism was engineered by people mentioned in that 2019 report: Marc Elrich, Gabe Albornoz, Eric Luedtke, Richard Madaleno, Jill Ortman-Fouse, and the entire Montgomery County Delegation in Annapolis. They all know each other, which is certainly fair an expected. What we would also expect, particularly from DEI progressives, is that they stop the schools’ red-lining and stop using MCPS as a mine for enriching each other.
