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Community Corner

OPINION: With Primary Over, Time to Look Ahead

With the field winnowed down, voters can assess the remaining six candidates.

Maryland’s primary has come and gone, and focus can now turn toward the general election. Here in Howard County, our candidates for Board of Education have been winnowed from 14 to six—Ann De Lacy, Jackie Scott, David Gertler, Janet Siddiqui, Bob Ballinger and Ellen Giles.

We’re halfway through the Hunger Games, with the inital skirmishes over and the obvious pretenders ousted from the race, so it’s time to turn a tougher eye on the remaining candidates. Most importantly, the general election will have a Damoclean sword hanging over it that was largely ignored in the primary—the looming teacher pension shift.

Shifting half the cost of teacher pensions from the state to the counties is now virtually assured, although the budget is not yet signed. In a new twist, a letter penned by the Montgomery County Executive and Council President suggested that the cost of the shift should be shared between the county and the school board, as opposed to leaving school budgets untouched. And, according to the head of the Maryland Association of Counties, jurisdictions across the state are begrudgingly supporting that route.

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As two-thirds of county revenue ends up in education coffers, this plan actually makes the most sense if a shift is unavoidable, as it appears to be. Still, this gives added weight to our school board choices, as the Board of Education ultimately approves the school system’s budget, and the newly elected members will be doing so under new, and daunting, fiscal constraints.

The fate of Howard County schools over the next few years will be a story of how the pension shift is handled. We cannot afford a school board beholden to one interest group at the expense of all others. Ergo, I'm concerned after the primary dust has settled that all three candidates endorsed by the Howard County Education Association (HCEA), including its former head (De Lacy), have moved on to the general election.

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De Lacy, Scott and Gertler were the only candidates to receive the benefit of HCEA’s mailers and robocalls, virtually the only countywide campaigning of any significance in the primary election. If money buys influence, HCEA has leapt to the front of the line for the next Board of Education.

This is in and of itself not a bad thing, and, of course, an endorsement by no means binds a candidate to any future position. It does, however, lend a new prism through which a voter can examine the next round of selection. In the next few years, negotiations between the Board of Education and county teachers' unions are more likely to be contentious than in the past, as the board will (finally) be footing a more significant portion of the overall bill, and dollars will be scarcer. Although “inmates running the prison” is perhaps too harsh a metaphor, we need to ensure that the seated Board can weigh all needs and parties equally.

None of these three candidates should be judged solely on who endorses them, just as the other three shouldn’t be judged on who didn’t. However, all six candidates need to face more vigorous questioning from the electorate, specifically on how they intend to handle millions of dollars in new liabilities. The surviving six have seven months in which to convince us they are up to the coming challenge.

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