The school community shared their concerns, questions and comments about Montgomery County Public Schools’ fiscal year 2025 operating budget and capital improvements budget at a forum held at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring Tuesday evening. The forum was the second of two hosted by County Councilmember Will Jawando (D-At-large) on the county’s school budget.
Jawando, who chairs the County Council’s Education and Culture Committee, said that the committee is deliberating over the next weeks about the school budget and plans to make a recommendation to the County Council on May 1.
The Council is targeting Memorial Day (May 27) as the day to pass the county’s entire budget, half of which goes toward Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), he said.
“We need to hear input from everybody, parents, teachers, students, administrators about what they want to see in the budget,” Jawando told MoCo360.
Dozens of parents, students, teachers and community members gathered at the forum to hear directly from the school officials. MCPS interim superintendent Monique Felder and Montgomery College President Jermaine Williams also attended.
Topics that attendees brought up included the delayed building of auditoriums at Crown High School in Gaithersburg and Woodward High School in Rockville, restorative justice, career and educational programs for MCPS’ English learners, and the removal of software that allows teachers to monitor student activities on school laptops.
Kendall Watson, a Kensington resident and parent to a North Bethesda Middle School student, expressed his concern for the delayed construction of two auditoriums, a decision that the Board of Education approved in March.
“My understanding is that the auditoriums that are planned for Woodward and Crown [high schools] are slated to be cut … it’s delayed indefinitely at this point. I think that’s a terrible idea,” Watson said before asking if Jawando would commit to reversing the school board’s decision.
Jawando explained the County Council can’t tell the board to make a different decision as they are duly elected. He added that the county’s $6 billion capital budget is “not enough to meet the needs of everything” in the school system’s capital improvements program.
Seth Adams, the associate superintendent of facilities management, also stepped in to explain why the auditoriums were delayed. He shared that MCPS wants to begin the construction process, but because they don’t have enough money to fund the projects in their entirety they are looking for “ways to break [the projects] down into pieces.”
Adams also said that the projects to build Crown and Woodward high schools are intended to alleviate overcrowding at surrounding schools and the district does not want to delay the opening of the schools.
Junee Kim, a student at Watkins Mill High School in Gaithersburg and the president of Young People for Progress–a nonprofit organization focused on increasing civic engagement for people under 35–praised the district’s continued investment in restorative justice (RJ) at the forum and for “recognizing how important RJ is to MCPS” students.
Kim was joined by a group of about a dozen other members of Young People for Progress who held signs that read “Restorative justice is social justice” and “No police in schools.” She also asked Felder if she would meet with the group to discuss restorative justice issues and Felder agreed to make that happen.
Following the exchange, Jawando praised the district’s continued investment in bringing full-time restorative justice coaches to schools.
“It backs up data that we’ve seen that in schools that have a full-time [coach], about 80% of those students don’t have recidivism, they do not do that activity again,” Jawando said. “And so it is working and I’m glad that the school system put it in their budget.”
Bobby Bartlett, a social studies teacher at Montgomery Village Middle School, asked about plans to defund the GoGuardian software, which allows teachers to monitor students’ web usage while using laptops in class.
“I think this would be a bad mistake and a choice that would make it more difficult for students to learn,” Bartlett said.
“In middle school one of the biggest challenges we have is maintaining students’ attention. … For many students, to place an unmonitored Chromebook in front of them is like handing them a Nintendo Switch, insisting that they use it to analyze historical documents,” he said.
Felder assured Bartlett that the school system would not leave teachers without a monitoring tool and that district has opted for a different software that has “the same functionality at $400,000 less.” She did not share the name of the new software.
“Where we are budget-wise, we would be remiss if we didn’t look into that,” she said. “My hope is that more teachers will use it. I understand that approximately 20% of our teachers are currently using GoGuardian and we certainly would want to increase that number.”
Maria Treminio-Ramirez, a program manager for MCPS’ Career Readiness Education Academy (CREA) program, shared her concern with the downsizing of the program. It serves more than 150 students, she said.
CREA is a program designed for older Emergent Multilingual Learners (EMLs) from 18 to 20 years old who are “unlikely to complete all of the requirements necessary to graduate with a diploma before aging out of the school system at 21 years old,” according to MCPS. The goal of CREA is to decrease the number of adult EML students who drop out of school and provide classes to pursue various career pathways, earn industry certifications and prepare for a General Education Diploma (GED).
“Our program has been downsized for the fiscal year 2025 even though our student numbers have grown,” Treminio-Ramirez said.
“And to be sincere, when I see my students, I see my parents. Hardworking young men providing for their brothers and sisters in El Salvador at the age of 20 for a better life. … If my parents had been offered this program I know their lives would be much easier. And that is why I want to encourage you to think about our CREA students,” she said.
Treminio-Ramirez said that the program needs better support with staffing and additional full-time educators. She said that just two full-time teachers are serving the program’s 150 students.
“Please think about them, of what Montgomery County could be and our ever-growing immigrant community,” she said. Watch the entire budget forum on MCPS’ YouTube channel.