One Vacant Seat, Many Issues
Five Candidates Running for Single School Board Slot

By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 7, 2008

A lone seat on the Board of Education is the only local choice facing Montgomery County voters in the primary election Tuesday.

Five candidates have stepped forward to seek the at-large seat of departing member Sharon W. Cox. Two of them, Philip Kauffman and Tommy Le, ran competitive races for school board seats in 2006. A third, Alies Muskin, has the crucial endorsement of the county teachers association. Two lesser-known candidates, Carey Apple and Rob Seubert, round out the field.

All registered voters can cast ballots in the nonpartisan race. The two candidates with the most votes advance to the general election.

Cox's seat is one of three on the eight-member board that are up for election this year. Longtime board member Steve Abrams faces a well-connected challenger, Laura Berthiaume, for a seat representing Rockville and Potomac, and both will appear on the November ballot. No one has challenged Christopher Barclay, who represents the eastern part of the county.

Kauffman, 55, of Olney put two daughters through Blake High School in Silver Spring while being active in the PTA. He has a law degree from the University of Maryland and works as deputy assistant general counsel in the federal Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2006, Kauffman ran against school board President Nancy Navarro, who represents the northeastern county, and collected 37 percent of the vote.

Le, 65, of Silver Spring, is a longtime PTA activist with two grown children who attended county schools. He has a doctorate in engineering sciences and works as a senior project manager at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Le ran against school board member Shirley Brandman for another at-large seat in 2006 and took 37 percent of the vote.

Muskin, 52, of Silver Spring is also a longtime PTA leader. Her daughters graduated from Einstein High School in Kensington. She did doctoral work at the City University of New York and is chief operating officer of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America.

Seubert, 40, of Silver Spring, is a former sixth-grade science teacher at White Oak Middle School who works as a loan officer. Apple, 52, of Germantown, is a recreation supervisor at an aquatic facility in Olney. He has a son at Clarksburg High School.

Muskin is considered to be the candidate to beat. In county school board elections, candidates endorsed by the Montgomery County Education Association tend to win.

But advocating for the teachers, in this election cycle, might prove tricky. The county is running a deficit, the real estate market has slowed and the school system will be hard-pressed to fund its labor agreement with the teachers, which provides annual increases of about 5 percent in three consecutive years. Funding the contract adds $75 million to the school system's $2.1 billion operating budget request for fiscal 2009 and accounts for most of the $121 million increase proposed by Superintendent Jerry D. Weast.

The teachers' contract is one of several areas that set the more outspoken Le apart from Kauffman and Muskin.

"That's the contract, and I would honor the contract," Muskin said. She explained that breaking the agreement would send teacher morale tumbling. Kauffman said the county must keep up with the generous pay scale in nearby Fairfax County, and with the cost of living. "We're all competing for a talent pool," he said.

Le, by contrast, opposes the raises and the influence wielded by the teachers association, which he referred to as the "Montgomery County Extortion Association" during a telephone interview. He said labor support has packed the school board with people who "owe their allegiance to anything that benefits the union."

Another sensitive point in the coming election is the relationship between the school board and Weast, who is in his ninth year as superintendent. The school board has long been viewed by some parent leaders as his rubber stamp.

The addition of three strong community activists to the board -- Navarro, Barclay and the since-departed Valerie Ervin, now a member of the County Council -- has changed the dynamic somewhat in recent years, but Weast is still widely viewed as a dominating presence at the board table.

Some parents felt betrayed when board members did not reverse a decision by Weast in late 2006 to phase out a program that housed special-needs students in self-contained Secondary Learning Centers within middle and high schools. Weast agreed, under considerable pressure, to slow the phase-out so that all students in the centers could stay through graduation. But antipathy remains.

Both Muskin and Kauffman said they believe the school board is doing a better job than it was two or three years ago at overseeing the superintendent and his programs.

"It's not that the school board needs to be hostile," Muskin said. "The point is, you can ask questions."

For the most part, the candidates do not suggest radical changes for Maryland's largest school system. They generally propose working harder on initiatives already in place.

Muskin said she would like to see more students participate in accelerated courses and programs and said the school system should redouble its efforts to raise the graduation rate.

Kauffman said he wants to see the middle school initiative successfully implemented, and he favors "meaningful efforts to increase parent involvement," exemplified by the school system's new Parent Academy program.

Asked what changes he might make if elected, Le said he would rewrite the curriculum to stress citizenship, duty and a sense of "good and evil." Kauffman said he would end social promotion, the practice in public education of advancing students through the grades by age rather than academic ability. Muskin said she would expand the hours of departments that interact regularly with parents, so that someone would be on hand "from 6 in the morning to 8 at night," to fit the schedules of working parents.

Both Apple and Seubert said they feel standardized testing has become excessive in the school system. Apple said pressure to score well has driven teachers to teach to the tests. Seubert said he would put a moratorium on testing that is not required by the state or federal government.

Seubert's broader focus is on reducing demands that distract teachers from planning and teaching their lessons, based on his own experience in the classroom. "Every year, it seemed like more and more was put onto the teachers," he said.

Apple said the school board is disconnected from the community, and he cited his experience fighting boundary changes in his neighborhood. "I don't see them being receptive or communicative," he said.