Basic Information
Email dg@domformoco.com
Website www.domformoco.com
Facebook @domformoco
Twitter @domformoco
Questions & Responses (All Candidates)
1 – What lessons learned do you have since the start of the pandemic?
All the science and data in the world isn’t going to help you if you lose the public’s trust.
Frankly, there’s not a sector of government that people really do trust anymore. Because of
that, you have to pay attention to more than just what experts and data say. Namely, you
have to pay attention to the fact that you’re absolutely not going to get a uniform public
response. That has huge implications for public policy, and we have to work harder to reinstill that baseline trust before the next crisis.
2 – If you could go back and do one thing differently from what was done in the last two
years in Montgomery County what would you change?
I would have pushed the Board of Education for more accountability and transparency
after the incident at East Silver Spring Elementary. Students need security to feel safe,
but they also have to trust the people that are responsible for that security. They
fundamentally do not and cannot trust police officers when they’re allowed to accost a 5
year old autistic student with impunity. There have been many questionable choices
made by the Board of Education, but the entire response to the East Silver Spring
Elementary incident was singularly incompetent from beginning to end.
3 – What do you think are the 3 biggest and most pressing issues facing our county in the
next 4 years? Why?
Teacher burnout, student mental health, and recovery after Covid learning loss. These
issues are all linked at the hip. You fundamentally will not get students back on the
right track if we don’t handle their mental health issues and give teachers what they
need to be successful and stay in the profession. The cost of us not getting our
students where they should be academically is their fundamental lack of
preparedness for life after education. We risk an entire generation of Montgomery
County students if we do nothing, which should be untenable for all of us.
While that’s going on, more than half of teachers nationwide have reported wanting
to leave teaching since Covid struck. Teacher quality is the single greatest factor of a
child’s education after parents. So when we see heavy turnover from experienced
professionals, that means we’re going to have far too many new teachers and longterm substitutes leading instruction. That is absolutely disastrous for academic
achievement, and it’s always the students from less wealthy families and our minority
students that get stuck with inexperienced teachers.
Regarding mental health, we have to take a closer look at the reasons behind the
crisis. The CDC recently found that more than half of adolescents reported emotional
abuse and one in 10 reported physical abuse by a parent or other adult in the home
during the pandemic. That in itself is a public health crisis.
But it’s not just abuse. There’s been rampant food insecurity, job loss among parents,
the loss of loved ones, and literally everyone is on edge all the time. Of course that’s
has a major impact on education. Compounding it, teachers have had to watch all of
this happen to their students while enduring it themselves.
This is all trauma. To solve the problem, we absolutely must take a trauma-focused
approach. We also have to ensure that students actually trust the system and the
professionals from which they receive treatment. We must also take additional steps
to safeguard for abuse of the system by bullies and abusive family members.
4 – What specifically do you plan to do in the 3 most pressing areas from Question 3?
Fundamentally, we must make the job of teaching easier while we attempt to make
up ground in the classroom. To this end, we can effectively divide the job of an
educator in half by creating teams of two teachers for each classroom of roughly
30 students.
Our best and most experienced teachers will serve as Lead Educators, and will
exclusively focus on instruction and lesson planning. Junior teachers and longterm substitutes will serve as Associate Educators, focusing on classroom
management and individualized instruction while they further develop their own
skills.
Finer details around the compensation and required qualifications for the newly
created positions will need to be negotiated with the teachers’ unions, but the
expectation is for Lead Educators to become among the highest-compensated
teachers in the nation.
Teachers could finally have a career path that doesn’t necessitate staying in the
same job for decades or leaving the profession entirely. We can help new teachers
ease into the profession by just having them focus on one thing.
This model of Team Teaching reduces student-to-teacher ratios in a manner that is
both more efficient and more effective than merely creating more classrooms.
Capital expenditures are already an immense burden, and this model will also add
capacity to existing high-demand magnet schools and similar programs.
As for mental health, we need to take a trauma-based approach to this problem,
which means “zen dens,” while they’re nice, just aren’t going to cut it. Students need to
feel safe, and they need a confidential environment with a trusted professional.
I fundamentally don’t buy that we can’t hire enough professionals. If the Board of
Education needs to adjust the budget or ask for more resources, then it should do so
immediately. We live in a market-driven society, and the market has clearly spoken.
There are no shortcuts to recovery here, and I say that as someone that has Complex
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and has fought depression and anxiety my entire life,
including as a student. Again, if kids don’t feel safe, they can’t reach their potential. We
just have to step up our game.
5 – Would you consider supporting changes to electoral process such as open primaries
or non-partisan elections in Montgomery County to allow 155,000+ registered
Unaffiliated/Independents in Montgomery County to vote locally when it counts?
Absolutely. As an independent myself, I feel entirely left behind by the political process in
Montgomery Count
Questions & Responses (BOE)
1 – What will you do to ensure MCPS is accountable to the BOE for decisions,
contracts, and spending?
I would require far more transparency. It is not unreasonable to have access to more
data and details about MCPS transactions & contracts than is currently available. This
information is vital to ensuring that taxpayer resources are being used efficiently and free
of corruption. In order to make important decisions about the budget, we must have
greater clarity about the resources already being misappropriated. That’s how we gain
the public’s trust when we need to increase the budget—we make certain that every
penny we already have is well-spent.
2 – Would you ever consider going fully virtual again given the costs seen in hindsight
(increased mental health issues, lowered test scores, and increased violence)?
“Ever”? It would be utterly irresponsible for me to swear off “ever” doing that. The
bar for going virtual would have to be extremely high, and based in part (but not
entirely) on the best data and expertise available to us. It doesn’t look like we’ll
reach the point where this would be necessary before every student has had the
opportunity to be vaccinated for Covid, with Moderna recently applying for
approval for young children. Hopefully, the subject is moot for this pandemic.
However, to expect that there will never be another situation where I have to
prioritize the health and safety of our children is ill-considered, at best. This is a
position where the job is specifically to ensure their well-being, and I won’t put
anything above that, including political considerations.
Instead, we have to be far better prepared for the eventuality that we will, in fact,
have another major disruption. If we were to implement my Team Teaching model,
we would be able to shift seamlessly to a hybrid in-person/virtual model instead of
having to outright close unless absolutely necessary. Teachers did their best during this pandemic, but we can’t expect them to work miracles anymore, and we
shouldn’t have expected it in the first place.
Parents should have options for keeping their family safe and their children
educated. We have a moral and legal responsibility to ensure nothing less to all
students. The best way we can efficiently prepare for the next disaster while also
best serving the needs of students right now is to implement Team Teaching.
3 – Do you support the shift from balanced literacy to structured literacy/science of
reading?
This shouldn’t be an either/or proposition. Teachers should be able to use multiple
tools to help their students achieve literacy. Especially with dyslexia being likely
under-diagnosed in young children, we shouldn’t be treating learning systems like
mutually-exclusive religions, but instead as the options that they are. Parents
should be able to find the programs that best meet their child’s needs somewhere
within Montgomery County Public Schools, and they should be free to enroll their
children in those programs without fear of rejection.
4 – What is your plan for continued recovery from learning loss and proficiency issues related to covid and virtual?
The benefits of my Team Teaching model to our students would be enormous.
Having multiple educators around means fewer opportunities for students to fall
through the cracks, both systemically and within classrooms. This is the same
concept as having smaller classrooms, except without requiring more
infrastructure and duplication of efforts.
From an equity perspective, students from underserved populations tend to get
stuck with less-experienced teachers or long-term substitutes. These teachers
often struggle in providing a high-quality education, which is to be expected of
anyone just starting out any new profession.
Under this plan, each classroom would be required to have a Lead Educator who
meets negotiated experience requirements, mitigating a fundamental source of
inequality that has plagued American education roughly since its inception.
Student learning levels are all over the place, and we must reach more students
where they have needs. We can only accomplish this with more teachers.
There would be opportunities for asynchronous learning on different lesson plans,
allowing some students to catch up while others keep moving forward. This would
substantially lessen the need for both short-term and long-term remediation,
alleviating yet another major financial burden on the system over time.
5 – What do you think MCPS should do to deal with staffing issues, subs, and make MCPS a place that people seek out for employment again?
In addition to implementing my Team Teaching model, I propose that we make MCPS
wages exempt from the Montgomery County income tax, we give priority access to
county services and affordable housing to MCPS employees, and we reserve a
permanent seat on the Board of Education for a representative of the teachers.
If we can fundamentally make the job of teaching easier, better compensate our
teachers, and listen to them, we can become the ultimate destination for teachers in the
region