Asleep at the Wheel: MCPS Is Failing Its Fiduciary Duty to Our Children
Record funding. Crumbling buildings. A widening achievement gap. Children losing their social workers. How did we get here?
Merriam Webster defines stewardship as “the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care. It involves overseeing, protecting, and preserving valuable assets, resources, or communities, often with the goal of passing them on in better condition for future generations.” Our Board of Education has a direct fiduciary duty to act as a faithful steward of public funds on behalf of children and taxpayers. Every contract signed, every dollar allocated, every position cut or protected should be measured against one standard: does this serve our children’s education responsibly and transparently?
Unfortunately, MCPS– its Board of Education, Superintendent Taylor, and the County Council, is failing that duty on every front simultaneously. Despite the County Council’s recent approval of a record $143 million increase for MCPS– more than any other year in recent memory, Superintendent Taylor is threatening student-facing positions, the capital budget was raided, and the achievement gap is ignored. The obvious solution, an independent MCPS Office of Inspector General, continues to be dismissed.
What follows is a full accounting of how that responsibility is being abandoned, and what genuine reform actually looks like.
Failure One: The Capital Fund Raid and Neglect of School Building Infrastructure
Suspected mold at Goshen Elementary School in Gaithersburg, MD
The first manifestation of systemic fiduciary duty failure is the continued gross neglect of our school buildings’ infrastructural needs, where our children spend a significant part of their day. When the County Council faced a $36 million budget gap, it should have demanded that MCPS cut the bloated $169 million electric bus contract that cost taxpayers dearly after a transportation director went to prison. The County Council should have also demanded the end to the millions rubber-stamped through consent agendas without scrutiny. Instead, it raided the capital improvements fund, pulling money away from HVAC repairs, roof replacements, and crumbling infrastructure.
Rockville City Councilmember Adam Van Grack called this move what it is: fiscal irresponsibility. To add further injury to the matter, some communities demanding repairs have either been waiting for years or just outright ignored:
Col. Zadok Magruder High School has dead mice and a crumbling auditorium ceiling — and is still waiting for a renovation date;
Wootton High School, now closing because of widespread documented maintenance problems despite appeal after appeal by parents, was first approved for major capital improvements in 2019 — its deteriorating conditions ignored for years until the board’s solution was to close the school entirely rather than fix it;
Damascus High School had a $127 million renovation approved in 2020 with a 2025 completion date — delayed repeatedly by budget concerns, it was finally funded this cycle but will not be ready until 2031. If it were not for the continued advocacy by parents who demanded action, who knows if the Board would have approved it;"
A. Mario Loiederman Middle School in Silver Spring has extreme temperatures and mold;
Twinbrook Elementary’s scheduled renovation was removed from this year’s budget again;
Even the Carver Educational Services Center, where MCPS administrators work, has pests, mold, and air quality concerns.
MCPS admits that nearly two-thirds of its schools are more than 25 years old, with mold, burst pipes, and failing systems so long deferred that emergency repairs now cost more than proactive maintenance would have.
Further, Superintendent Taylor himself said at his October 2025 CIP presentation: “There’s a lot of schools that should be on this list — a lot — but we have limited resources.” Despite this, the County Council took $36 million away from the capital fund anyway.
Both bodies– the County Council and the Board of Education, prefer borrowing against our children’s future twice, once when we let the waste accumulate unchecked, and again when they raided the capital fund to conceal it, rather than doing what taxpayers and families have every right to expect: responsible stewardship of public dollars in service of our children’s education.
Failure Two: Taylor’s Cuts Will Deepen the Achievement Gap
The primary mission of every public school system is academic excellence. It is the reason these institutions exist. Every child– regardless of zip code, income, or background– deserves a rigorous, high-quality education that gives them the knowledge, skills, and foundation to thrive in life. Whole books, textbooks, explicit instruction in reading and math, and a curriculum rich in science, literature, history, and mathematics are not luxuries. They are the building blocks of a life well-lived. And yet, even still, academic excellence is nowhere to be found in what Superintendent Taylor is proposing.
No matter how it is presented in the media, one fact must be stated plainly: MCPS is not being cut. It received a record $143 million increase. The $36 million gap is simply the difference between what was requested and what was approved. In a $3.7 billion institution such as MCPS, that difference should have been absorbed through smarter spending. It is Taylor who is choosing to eliminate the people who serve our most vulnerable children.
Herein lies the rub. Taylor's words and Taylor's actions tell two very different stories. The dichotomy is profound. While Superintendent Taylor says his goal is to keep reductions away from the classroom, his official reductions list, released at the May 21 board meeting, tells an entirely different story:
At least 436 positions are on the chopping block, 274 of them filled
The largest single targeted classification: special education resource teachers, with 118.5 FTEs cut at a cost of $12 million
Social workers face a reduction of 38 FTEs
Of the 436 total cuts, 295 are school-based positions and only 28 are central staff
Central Office overhead sits at 45% non-instructional spending compared to 35% in Fairfax County
A faithful steward of our public school system protects the most vulnerable first by prioritizing academic excellence through ridding waste first. Shamefully, Taylor is using the most vulnerable children in this district as leverage in a budget negotiation. The MCEA Apple Ballot-endorsed board, beholden to the union that put them there, is letting him do it.
Your eyes are your witness. Look at who bears the cost, students who are already being failed.
Black students: 48.3% proficient in ELA, 22.9% proficient in math
Hispanic students: 34.3% proficient in ELA, 15.7% proficient in math
Source: Brenda M. Diaz, 'Fully Funding MCPS Does Not Lead to Academic Excellence,' April 2026.
This failure comes despite studies conducted and plans devised to address their particular needs. In 2023, the MCEA-endorsed board commissioned an Anti-Racist System Audit with 130,000 participants, a formal action plan, and mandated professional learning. The numbers above are its report card. The verdict is clear: three years later, in one of the wealthiest school districts in the country, the majority of Black and Hispanic students cannot demonstrate proficiency in reading or math. The audit did not move the needle in any meaningful way. Following the recommendations of this audit will not close the achievement gap. It will not close because of another study, another advisory committee, or another coalition chasing the rainbow of systemic change without the structural accountability needed to make it real.
When Taylor proposes cutting 118.5 special education resource teachers and 38 social workers before he touches a meaningful number of Central Office positions, he is making a deliberate choice. He is choosing to further destabilize the support systems that serve our most vulnerable students, the very students already being failed by this system, in order to protect an administrative apparatus that has never been held to any performance standard.
Taylor’s decision-making is, at the very least, questionable — at its worst, downright reprehensible.
The proposed elimination of all 26 College and Career Navigators from MCPS high schools makes this point painfully clear. These are the school-based staff who help less affluent students navigate college applications, identify scholarships, and access opportunities that wealthier families simply pay for privately. These are the people who helped my own middle daughter win access to the Maryland Institute College of Art with numerous scholarships and financial aid, the same opportunities that less affluent families like my own across this district deserve. Yes, eliminating these 26 positions saves $1.9 million. However, what it costs our students in lost college access cannot be measured in a budget line. And because MoCo Cap provides career counseling through non-MCPS funds, Taylor can cut these positions and remain technically compliant with the Blueprint’s career counseling mandates, finding the legal floor and building his budget on it while less affluent students pay the price. As we dig through Taylor’s budget proposal, line item by line item, what we find is that our standard of academic excellence is nowhere in sight.
MCPS likes to call its new strategic plan “Future Ready.” Based on these proposed cuts, from gutting special education teachers, eliminating College and Career Navigators, to finding the legal floor on every obligation to students, it appears MCPS is getting ready for a future of failure.
An MCPS that is truly “Future Ready” would follow real alternatives to Taylor’s supposed solutions:
Comprehensive contracts and procurement reform targeting low-value and no-bid relationships could save $10-20 million annually
Phasing out 1:1 Chromebooks at the elementary and middle school level could save $6-13 million while actually improving learning outcomes (MCPS spent roughly $19.5 million on Chromebooks in a single recent year)
Flattening Central Office administrative layers could save $8-15 million
An honest zero-based review of programs that cannot demonstrate a clear tie to academic outcomes could save another $3-8 million
Ending $700,000 in annual promotional swag spending would not close the gap, but it would send an unmistakable signal about priorities
Conservative combined range: $25-50+ million annually. More than enough to close the $36 million gap without cutting a single special education resource teacher, social worker, or school-based support position.
Failure Three: No Independent Oversight Exists — And Nobody Has Demanded It
$169 million. No competitive bid. No accountability. Read the Inspector General's report.
Every fiduciary failure above shares a common root: there is no MCPS-specific independent Inspector General with the authority to review contracts before they are signed, audit spending in real time, and report directly to the board and the public. There is no way to directly tie academic excellence to our taxpayer dollars with full accountability and transparency in the spirit of true stewardship.
Yes, Montgomery County has an Office of the Inspector General, but its jurisdiction over MCPS is limited and it reports to county government, not to the school board. When the county OIG investigated MCPS procurement practices in 2025, she found that MCPS lacks a system to track or aggregate vendor payments, causing purchases to slip past required oversight. Instead of following these recommendations, Taylor pushed back on the one independent check that exists, calling her report lacking in rigor. Taylor has himself acknowledged the need for an MCPS-specific independent Inspector General, and yet nothing has happened. Families and taxpayers are left with an internal audit function that reports up the same chain of command, revealing or obscuring data as it pleases. Every budget is then pure theater presented as accountability. It’s a show, folks– at our expense.
A real independent MCPS OIG would have the authority to review contracts before they are signed, not after the damage is done. It would have the power to audit any expenditure at any time, without requesting permission from the superintendent. It would report directly to the full board and to the public, bypassing the administrative chain entirely. It would have subpoena authority to compel documentation and whistleblower protections for employees who report waste, fraud, or abuse.
Let’s imagine how much pain an already-established OIG would have saved MCPS. Had an independent OIG existed five years ago, the $169 million electric bus contract might never have been approved. That contract was signed by a transportation director who later went to prison, and MCPS recouped only $1.5 million of it. The $700,000 in annual promotional swag might have been flagged. The no-bid contracts that have never faced competitive review might have been challenged. The board members who rubber-stamp millions in consent agenda items might have been forced to actually read what they were approving. MCPS might not have spent over $1.3 million in legal fees in a single year fighting parents in federal court all the way to the Supreme Court, only to lose.
And the warehouse debacle, reported by the Parents’ Coalition this week, might never have happened. In October 2025, Taylor announced that MCPS needed a new warehouse — neglecting to mention that MCPS had already leased a new warehouse in April 2023. Within days of his announcement, the board approved a 10-year lease on an empty 161,500 square foot shell building at $245,614.58 per month. Taylor then inserted $13 million into the FY2027 capital budget to build out the interior. The county council refused to fund it even though the lease had already been signed. MCPS is now committed to more than $3 million per year in operating budget payments for a building that cannot be used, all while 436 positions are on the chopping block and children lose their social workers and special education teachers.
To put it mildly, we currently have a board asleep at the wheel of a $3.7 billion institution, and our children are in the back seat. No wonder we are experiencing so many crashes. A driver who cannot be bothered to read the road signs, check the mirrors, or show up to the vehicle inspection is not fit to be behind the wheel. Stewardship of $3.7 billion in public money is one of the primary functions of a board, and right now, the people holding that wheel cannot even be bothered to show up to community forums to speak to you. Our children and our greater community are paying the price for every missed turn, every ignored warning sign, and every crash that proper oversight could have prevented.
The Machine That Ignores the Watchdogs
So who put this board behind the wheel in the first place? Why won’t they step on the brakes?
The MCEA Apple Ballot has delivered a school board where every sitting member owes their seat to union endorsement. Montgomery Perspective’s Adam Pagnucco, the most respected analyst of MoCo politics, has called it “the WMD of MoCo politics.”
CleanSlate MoCo, always coming with the goods
In 2024, MCEA knocked out three school board incumbents, outspent all general election school board candidates combined, and its new president walked into the board meeting the day after the election to remind the board who was really in charge. It wasn’t the parents. It wasn’t the community that voted for them. No. It was the union– MCEA– that spent the money and the manpower to put them there. MCEA President David Stein shamelessly proclaimed this paradigm in his own words when he announced, “We are the ones closest to the work. We are the ones who see the problems vividly and immediately” — failing to see that it is, in fact, the parents and the children who feel these fiduciary failures the most. On all accounts, this is how the MCEA, Board of Education, and MCPS governing coalition works to dismiss our voice entirely.
In the 2026 race, that same MCEA Apple Ballot is backing its candidates again, of course, including one whose very name evokes the lasso they use to keep this board in line. What it belies is a truth we, as parents and taxpayers, can no longer ignore: the Board of Education is a nonpartisan school board in name only, a self-serving body protecting its interests time and time again. The parents and community organizations demanding accountability are systematically being sidelined. Their testimony is ignored. Their watchdog reports are shelved. Their communities, overruled.
Inexcusably, the MCEA Apple Ballot doesn’t only betray parents and taxpayers– it betrays its own members. The teachers and support staff losing their jobs in Taylor’s proposed cuts are not the union’s priority, although their organized protests before the County Council are offered as proof. Many of them are MCEA members themselves, social workers, special education teachers, therapeutic counselors, sacrificed on the altar of a political machine that is more interested in maintaining its grip on power than in protecting the people who actually work with our children every day. Let that sink in: MCEA’s standard modus operandi is using its millions of dollars to protect the machine, not its very own members who are on the chopping block. It refuses to demand real accountability through true reform. Solidarity defiled through a governing coalition seeking to protect only itself.
Thankfully, Montgomery County has a robust network of community organizations doing the accountability work the Board of Education, MCPS, MCEA, and the County Council refuse to do. The Parents Coalition of Montgomery County has documented waste and procurement failures for years, including the warehouse debacle reported this week. The Montgomery County Taxpayers League has consistently raised the alarm about spending without accountability. MCCPTA, representing tens of thousands of MCPS families, has pressed for transparency on budget decisions that directly affect children. The Red Flags Coalition sounded early warnings about curriculum and policy changes the board dismissed. The Save Wootton movement mobilized an entire community against Option H and filed a formal state appeal backed by sworn affidavits from over 300 households. Moderately MoCo has provided a platform for substantive policy debate in which the board itself refuses to engage.
These organizations are not obstacles. They are the eyes and ears of a community that is paying attention despite being ignored. A board that genuinely serves its fiduciary duty does not dismiss them. It listens, includes their insight, and treats their documented concerns as the accountability mechanism they are. Ignoring their critical insight is full-on arrogance on display, characteristic of an MCEA Apple Ballot-controlled board answering to the union instead of the families it serves.
What Real Stewardship Looks Like
Real stewardship of a $3.7 billion public institution means establishing an independent Inspector General with genuine authority. It means ending the rubber-stamp consent agenda so every taxpayer dollar faces scrutiny before it is spent, not after the damage is done. It means demanding that a superintendent cut waste at the top before cutting the people who serve children at the bottom. It means preserving neighborhood schools, protecting gifted and talented programs, and giving parents a genuine seat at the table. It means a board that meets more than once a month to do its job. Finally, it means respecting and incorporating the insights of community watchdog organizations that have been doing this board’s homework for it.
Thomas Jefferson understood what is at stake when institutions fail the people they serve. “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree.” A school board that rubber-stamps budgets, fights parents in court, and allows the County Council to raid capital funds to hide its failures is not serving the people. It is serving itself.
Montgomery County voters funded these schools at record levels. We have every right to demand that someone on that board, someone genuinely independent, beholden to no union and no county executive, hold the institution to the standard their investment deserves. The dam of unchecked power has held long enough. Montgomery County, are you ready to break it?
Visit DiazForBOE.com to read more.
#MCPS #Budget #DiazForBOE #MontgomeryCounty #OIG #AchievementGap #FiduciaryDuty #IndependentVoice
Brenda, you are this county's watchdog. We have to wonder why we spend $13 million/year on the Office of Legislative Oversight. If they wanted to, they could call MCPS's bluffs.