Sunil's Priorities |
Supporting Student Mental Health and Well-being
MCPS students have been reporting a gathering youth mental health crisis for a few years now. The dislocation caused by the coronavirus-led school closure is going to further add to stress and anxiety in many families. At this time, it will be more important than ever before for our students to learn how to be resilient, flexible, and empathetic and for our teaching to reflect support for youth mental health, even as a prerequisite for academic performance.
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Investing in Counselors, Faculty, and Staff
Student surveys show that the most positive aspect of public education for students in Maryland is their relationships with teachers and staff members; there is no education without counselors, teachers and staff. The coming budget crisis will put significant strain on staffing in our schools, and we as a community need to prioritize maintaining reasonable class sizes, hiring more counselors, and giving educators sufficient time for planning and training.
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Building Trust Through Clear Communication
The COVID-19 crisis will create severe a budget shortfall for MCPS and the County. Now, more than ever, we need the school system to engage in an open dialogue with the public around funding priorities and possible solutions - including an honest conversation around school capacity and boundary changes. We should strive to rebuild the relationship between schools and families, and provide the clarity in communications that families deserve.
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Sunil's Aim for Excellence plan
Sunil isn't running for the Board of Education because he thinks everything is broken; he's running to take what's working in our school system and make it excellent. To read more about Sunil's plans for special education, pre-k, environmental education and climate change, cultivating student journalism, and magnet program screening, please take a look at Sunil's Aim for Excellence plan: |
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Sunil's plan to address the coming budget crisis The two major sources of funding for MCPS--the county and the state government--will both take a tremendous hit to revenues due to the current economic disruption. Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, the General Assembly passed a bill to fund the Kirwan Commission recommendations, but the new budget reality is uncertain. In order to defend public education, we will need creative budget solutions and determined leadership at the local level. While there are other ways of saving money, one way we can help ourselves is through better utilization of our current facilities. The current MCPS Capital Improvements Program (CIP) is $1.82 billion, which requires $1.2 in new bonds that the county government has to borrow from the capital market. If we borrowed that entire amount, we would have to set aside almost $100 each year in repayments. These repayment dollars come from the operating budget, which is where money for salaries and curriculum come from. MCPS has to build new schools to keep up with the demand, but what we are doing now is building more while leaving many classrooms empty. At the start of school year 2019-20, we had 10,860 students over-capacity in about half of our 208 schools and 9,357 empty seats in the other half of our schools. Not all the overcrowding and under-enrollment are near each other, but this is not simply a capacity problem; it is a distribution problem as well. When we choose to build anew before filling the empty seats, we are forced to increase how much we borrow and the amount of money we put aside in the operating budget for debt repayment. If we can even reduce our borrowing by $100 million, we will save $8 million in debt repayment, which is roughly what it would cost to hire 100 new teachers. Add the money saved from not renting portables, and suddenly we are talking about hiring 120-130 teachers. There’s a clear choice here for me. If we are going to say we care about the performance gap, and we are not willing to put more teachers, staff, and counselors in our schools, that’s not a real commitment. So, are you planning to bus my kids to the other side of the county? Heck, no. In a school system where over 35 percent of students do not attend the school closest to them (and we are not even counting the magnet kids), the result of this rationalization is as likely to reduce commutes as it is to increase them. But I do not want to send students on long bus rides. Obviously, the definition of a long bus ride is different for different folks, but I’d follow an adjacency rule if and when reassigning students. My hope is that if we develop a fair, legitimate, and transparent method for regular, systemwide review and adjustment that allows us to stay abreast of population and demographic shifts, over time we will only make incremental changes to school boundaries rather than the 35-year backlog we have in our rebalancing efforts. But we can only do this if we can meet two conditions: a) we rebuild the home and school partnership and trust through clear communication, active community input, and transparent decision-making; and b) we have assertive leadership within the Board of Education that is willing to make tough reprioritization decisions and work with the county government, the county council, and the state. School boundary change was going to come before the virus hit us. Now, with the coming budget crunch, it is all but inevitable. I am the only candidate in the race with a viable plan that can be developed into a fair, legitimate, and transparent process that does not tear up the county and pushes toward equal access for all in our public education. If there is not equal access, we will jeopardize public education itself and then the county as a whole will suffer. It will make no difference if we live in one part of the county and not another. If you want to learn more about my plan, click here.
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