Looming Budget Gap Also Presents Issue for Candidates
By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Montgomery County voters will pick school board members in two contested races Tuesday.
One race pits veteran board member Stephen N. Abrams, knowledgeable but sometimes polarizing, against well-credentialed newcomer Laura V. Berthiaume for the District 2 seat.
The other is a contest for the at-large seat being vacated by Sharon W. Cox. Vying for the spot are Phil Kauffman, who generally approves of the board's work, and Tommy Le, a contrarian.
Incumbent Christopher S. Barclay (Silver Spring) is running unopposed for the District 4 seat.
The nonpartisan campaign's central issue is the record of Superintendent Jerry D. Weast, who is in his 10th year, and what to do upon his expected departure three years hence.
The candidates generally agree on a few basic points: Weast has done some great work for the school system, lowering class sizes and deploying extra help to schools in the most disadvantaged communities. But the candidates say Weast has become increasingly remote to rank-and-file parents and teachers who want his ear. His successor, they say, should be more of a diplomat.
"I personally believe the system is a lot better off under Jerry Weast than it would have been under any other person," said Abrams, 65, a lawyer with a background in finance and economics, who is in his third term representing Rockville and Potomac. But Abrams faults Weast lately for being "nonapproachable and taking pride in his nonapproachability."
Berthiaume, Abrams's challenger, is a 44-year-old lawyer who works in Rockville and specializes in trusts, estates and elder law. She credits Weast for "a lot of great things, particularly when he first came in," but says Weast's leadership style "has calcified. We've had a narrowing of the process. He's not that interested these days in hearing from parents and students in the community as he was when he got here."
The board voted unanimously last year to renew Weast's contract, frustrating the superintendent's critics. There is widespread concern, at least among parent activists, that the board listens too often to Weast and the employee unions and too seldom to parents.
Kauffman, 55, works as a lawyer for the Department of Veterans Affairs and lives in Olney. One of his platform statements is that the board should hold "regular town meetings," in addition to business meetings, "so that board members can hear directly from the community their concerns about our schools."
Le, a 66-year-old retired senior project manager at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is running against Kauffman. He wrote in an e-mail response to questions that he thinks the current board, with the exception of Abrams and Cox, "are actually schools' union people in disguise. Their only job is to rubber stamp the contracts that the schools' unions had pre-drafted for them to take to the board tables."
Abrams and Cox were the only board members to vote against the current teacher contract, which awards raises of about 5 percent last year, this year and next year. That opposition is no longer the minority view. All four candidates say the teacher contracts should be renegotiated.
County government is projecting a $250 million deficit for the budget cycle that begins in July. Schools leaders have said closing the gap will probably mean letting employees go or paying them less. A third option is eliminating some or all of Weast's academic initiatives, which have swelled the school system's annual budget by at least $100 million.
The Washington Post asked each of the four candidates, in a brief questionnaire, to prioritize those cuts from first to last.
Kauffman said he would trim salaries first, positions second and Weast's initiatives last. "Initiatives with proven success should be eliminated only as a last resort," he wrote, and teachers should be targeted last in any staff reduction.
Abrams concurred. "I am most protective of the Weast initiatives," he wrote, while agreeing with Kauffman that the school system should take "a hard look" at which ones are yielding results.
Berthiaume said priority should go to salaries, including Weast's nearly half-million-dollar annual compensation package. She said preserving reasonable class size is a priority: "There is little point in trying to teach an elementary school class with 32 children in it."
Le, alone among the four, said Weast's initiatives should be the first to go. A staff reduction, he wrote, might create an opportunity "to shed some low-performing teachers."
The Post also asked the candidates to state a position on how best to teach children of varying skill levels, a defining issue for many parents in a school system that is both high-wealth and high-poverty.
The Montgomery school system favors placing students of all abilities in the same classroom and periodically dividing them into smaller groups by ability, a technique known as differentiation. Some schools are allowed, however, to group students in classrooms by ability, a technique that simplifies instruction but threatens to warehouse low performers.
Two candidates, Abrams and Le, said they favor heterogeneous classrooms. "Schools need to create classroom situations to really replicate the way our society is working," Le wrote.
Berthiaume said the question is one the school board should study in depth. "I do think," she wrote, "based on my own personal experience, that there is an objective reality of 'giftedness' in some children," which, she added, schools ignore at their peril.
Kauffman alone said he favors grouping students by ability. "While some teachers are capable of providing differentiation to many levels in a heterogeneous classroom," he wrote, "many are not."
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