On Tuesday 5/2/2023, there was a virtual forum hosted by MCPS and featuring Dr. McKnight, Councilmember Jawando, Dr. Williams and BOE member Silvestre. Esther Wells live tweeted the meeting and her tweets have been cataloged into the piece below with some minor edits for clarity. Q: Budgets are in, whatContinue Reading

Background On Wednesday 3/15, Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich released his budget which included an 8% overall increase in budget and 10% increase for MCPS. The cost to tax payers is being advertised as a “10 cents” increase but amounts to about a 10% increase in the tax rate fromContinue Reading

Executive Summary Data for MCPS AP tests in 2019, 2020, and 2021 were analyzed for: Passing scores are defined as scores of 3, 4, or 5. The total number of exams taken declined each year (41,048 in 2019; 39,254 in 2020; and 31,750 in 2021). The total number of examsContinue Reading

MCPS Ethics Policy You can view the official MCPS and MCPS BOE Ethics Policy here. After reading the ethics policy and hearing that Joftus has said he will recuse himself from these decisions regarding KID Museum, it became clear to that he is following ethics guidelines by the rules. JoftusContinue Reading

Background You may remember that on 7/22 there was a seemingly huge jump in covid positive hospital admissions On 7/29 we posted an update which included multiple responses from DHHS and other government officials. We maintained, despite resistance that there was likely either an error or it was a dataContinue Reading

Previous Article For Context Responses From DHHS, Dr. Stoddard, And Others I wanted to thank Dr. Earl Stoddard, DHHS, Councilmember Friedson and County Executive Elrich for responding to our questions today. Here are some of the responses which acknowledge and attempt to explain the discrepancies. Issue With Counting Alternate CareContinue Reading

7/29/2022 – Update – Earl Stoddard and MOCO DHHS Respond 7/26/2022 – MOCO Dashboard, DHHS, Elrich Claim High Communities Levels See the MOCO Covid Dashboard here which began showing “Community Level Status: High” a few days ago: https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/covid19/data/ Here are some official tweets about it from DHHS and the CountyContinue Reading

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about if Montgomery County’s rapid drop in positive Covid cases are actually representative of what is happening on the ground. Some have questioned if the case dropping is due to an increase in availability of rapid tests. But I’m going to explain how thatContinue Reading

Cases and Hospitalizations with Vaccination Status Here is the full chart and then we’ll break it down with analysis piece by piece. Data is from 7/19/2021 to 8/15/2021. I would love to see this publicly available and updated regularly for everyone to see – it is the most important informationContinue Reading