Employees using MCPS credit cards for suspiciously personal use; secretive policy meetings; a proposed 10% tax hike to fund a school system with no performance improvements in return; capricious boundary changes. There are lots of reasons that people are upset with the Board of Education, but I fail to see the need for a rumpus. Here’s why.
During the 2020 general election there was a referendum, Question D, that sought to abolish the four at-large representatives on the County Council. Since the first congressional elections in 1788, at-large representation has been widely known to be a voting rights violation, because a small group of voters elects all of the winners. (The best guide to the discrimination of at-large representation is The Bias of At-Large Elections: How it Works.)
The opposition to defeat Question D congealed quite quickly and quite predictably, led by a very capable Council Member Evan Glass—himself an at-large member. He was able to get the unions (except police and fire) that we all pay for, the non-profits that we all pay for, and the teachers’ union that we all pay for to help defeat a badly needed reform.
What does this have to do with the Board of Education and its attendant rumpus?
The BoE is comprised of seven elected members and one student whom we’ll leave out of the discussion. Of those seven members:
- Two are elected at-large (Silvestre, Harris).
- Five represent districts (Rivera-Oven, Smondrowski, Yang, Wolff, Evans).
To prove the point that a small group of voters elects all of the at-large representatives, both Silvestre and Harris live in Silver Spring. The two previous at-large members (Ortman-Fouse, Dixon) also live in Silver Spring. As far as I can tell, every single at-large member on the Board of Education for the past 20 years lived below the Beltway except for Kauffman, even though most residents live above the Beltway.
What about the other five representatives? Do they really represent five separate BoE districts?
Each candidate for three contested district positions appeared on all our 2022 ballots. I live comfortably in the center of District 3, and here is an image of the candidates appearing on my ballot.
There is no need for candidates for Districts 1 and 5 to appear in my District 3 ballot. In fact, if you view the proof sheets for every single precinct in the 2022 elections, you’ll see that all the BoE’s “district” candidates appear on all the ballots, even in those districts these representatives don’t live in or represent!
These district representatives don’t just show up on our ballots. They actively campaign throughout the county just as any at-large candidate. Here, for example, is District 3 representative Julie Yang (Bethesda/Potomac) campaigning in District 2 (Gaithersburg) on October 29, 2022 (taken from her Facebook page).
These BoE members are not district representatives: they are all elected at-large. This makes the BoE an even more invidious vote diluter than our own county council. Our BoE ballots give the impression that the winners “represent” one district or another, when they deceptively are at-large candidates representing the small group of voters that elects them all.
It’s not just me who thinks this practice is deceptive. Delegate Brian M. Crosby (D-St. Mary’s) introduced House Bill 0655 in 2021 that requires district representatives on MoCo’s BoE (and other county-level offices throughout the state) be elected by a plurality of votes cast within that district. Unfortunately, he had to re-introduce the bill in 2023 to exclude boards of education, and anyway both bills died. Why that happened we may never know.
Council Member Evan Glass acknowledged several times during the Question D referendum that voting for an elected body with all at-large members is “not fair or equitable.” Presumably he also believes the current BoE is neither fair nor equitable, but we have to await his own position on this matter.
This is why I don’t get upset at any decision, budget, or initiative that the BoE’s members propose. All seven of them are elected in sham, illegitimate, at-large elections that give voice to only a small group of entitled and aggressive voters. That’s true of the current seven members; it’s true of all their predecessors.
Just as John Lewis and Harvey Milk overcame at-large voter dilution, we can as well. Just as Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (and many other Supreme Court justices) excoriated at-large voter dilution, we can as well. We are two generations behind a heroic civil rights movement; those activists made indescribable sacrifices for fair representation, and all we have to do is copy their script. I really, really doubt the seven at-large BoE members have the courage or conviction to suppress us with dogs and water cannon.
There is no need for a rumpus. We only need to overcome voter apathy and the temptation to move somewhere else—as some of your friends and family have already done. Your first step is to contact your Annapolis representative to get HB0655 re-introduced and passed in its original form.
