School Board Member To Appear At State Conservative Conference

Howard County Board of Education member Brian Meshkin will appear this weekend as a moderator on an education panel during a conference being organized by the Maryland Conservative Action Network. 

According to the event press release, the "Turning The Tides" conference will bring together conservative activists from across the state to discuss such topics as Governor O’Malley’s Plan Maryland and, “its ties to the UN Agenda 21, Sharia Law and its threat to the MD Constitution.”

Meshkin said politics do not play a part in his participation as a moderator at the conference, instead he is motivated by a desire to learn more about the problems facing the state’s education system and potential fixes.

In particular, he said he hopes to touch on the subject of e-learning during the panel, titled “Educational Imperatives.” 

Other topics to be discussed include education imperatives, petition drives, election integrity, public sector union obligations, new media, the Maryland Constitution, and “the art of political persuasion.”

Meshkin was invited to moderate the conference’s education-related panels by event organizer Tonya Tiffany, a Columbia resident and mother of two Howard County public school students, who he met in 2010 while campaigning for the school board.

“We are looking at times with really tight budgets,” he said. “We need to be finding creative ways to spend less.”

Some new ideas he’s been researching recently include e-learning in the vein of the Khan Academy, an online California-based educational classroom. 

“I’m a big believer in the Kahn Academy approach,” Meshkin said. “E-learning can be very complementary…In Howard County we have a very old fashion, factory model of education.”

Eventually Meshkin hopes to come up with better ways use technology in Howard County to teach.

“My hope is that technology will be used to deliver instructional information to the masses; then the teacher can identify which children are not really getting it and then can spend that one-on-one time to teach them.” 

Meshkin said he hopes to bring new ideas from the conference back to Howard County as a means of solving some of the county-wide educational problems.

“We have children here who are falling through the cracks,” he said, adding that every one out of six Howard County public school children are living at or below the poverty line.

“We do have some issues here, we do have an achievement gap,” Meshkin said.

When asked if appearing at a conservative conference implied a political bias, he said, “My job is to represent every child in the system. Education is one of the issues that should unify us. We are one Howard County. We are one Maryland. When I look at the education issue, I don’t see a partisan issue at all.”

Among the dozen of event speakers are former radio talk show hosts Fred and Catherine Mann-Grandy, who will be speaking about Sharia law, and “its incompatibility with both the MD and U.S. Constitutions.”

Tiffany said she picked Meshkin to serve as the education moderator because she was “impressed” by his involvement with the passage of a bike helmet law, and for his  “ideas on getting the voc[ational]-tech back in schools.”

Tiffany says that one of the education topics she hopes will be discussed involves creating programs for schools that have a “patriotic message.”

“Education is key when you have certain messages going on in schools,” she said. “When my son came home on Earth Day last year, he had a coloring book that on one of the pages referred to ‘Mother Earth.’ 

“I think that puts a deity into the school’s program. We’re just trying to make sure there is a balanced message getting out to the kids.”

The conference is being held Oct. 29 at a hotel in Annapolis.