Basic Information
Email vote@MarcusAlzona.com
Website MarcusAlzona.com
Facebook facebook.com/MarcusAlzona
Twitter twitter.com/MarcusAlzona
Other linkedin.com/in/MarcusAlzona
Questions & Responses (All Candidates)
1 – What lessons learned do you have since the start of the pandemic?
As a computer scientist with years of networking, videography and livestreaming experience, when the pandemic started I quickly moved to assist multiple organizations during the initial months of the lockdown, volunteering as remote event / Livestream director for multiple non-profit organizations (education, student sports, religious, community), producing hundreds of livestreams and videos during the pandemic.
In the first few months, when little information was known, social distancing was critical, in particular for our senior citizens and people with other risk factors. However, by the summer of 2020 studies and data from across the country and across the world showed time and time again that schools could be safely reopened.
Schools across the state, across the country, and across the world re-opened in the Fall of 2020, yet a year later MCPS was one of the last to do so (with the county trying to block Catholic schools from safely reopening, with Governor Hogan then stepping in to allow those schools to make their own choices).
The effect on our students was severe, hurting poor and minority children the most.
Montgomery County needs school board members that will push back on reflexive school closures not backed by the science. Electing the same people who advocated for endless lockdowns in the 2020-2021 school year won’t help during any future situation – we need a better balance of members going forward.
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?
Montgomery County Public Schools should have re-opened in the Fall of 2020, in the phased and hybrid approach done by multiple schools across the state and country.
Instead, the current school board and county council not only kept MCPS closed for nearly the entire school year, they also fought to keep Catholic schools and other non-MCPS education facilities closed as well.
3 – What do you think are the 3 biggest and most pressing issues facing our county in the next 4 years? Why?
For education in the county, the three biggest issues are:
▻ Keeping Schools Open and Safe
▻ Having Common Sense Voices for Parents on the Board of Education
▻ Proper and Effective Use of Technology for STEM and Curriculum Transparency
4 – What specifically do you plan to do in the 3 most pressing areas from Question 3?
▻ Keep Schools Open and Safe
We need to keep our schools both open and safe, providing all our children with the great education they deserve.
We must follow the overwhelming number of studies and data from the past two years showing schools should remain open, and not reflexively close schools, causing our kids to fall farther behind in their education.
We must listen to our principals, who unanimously want School Resources Officers in MCPS schools. The board must stop portraying police as a problem, and return to viewing the police as a partner in keeping our schools safe.
▻ Common Sense Voice for Parents
Parents entrust MCPS with their children, and parents must have a voice on the school board. Schools need to be transparent with safety, health, and curriculum.
▻ Technology
With over 160,000 students and nearly 19,000 staff, Montgomery County Public Schools implements and manages the largest local Information Technology infrastructure in the entire state of Maryland. We need a board member that understands both the potential and the limitations of technology, who can provide proper guidance and oversight for STEM education and school infrastructure.
Technology can also be utilized to provide parents with curriculum transparency while simultaneously helping with student learning loss due to absences. There are many ways to accomplish these goals – we just need board members who understand the technologies and who are willing to provide actual transparency.
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?
Yes
Questions & Responses (BOE)
1 – What will you do to ensure MCPS is accountable to the BOE for decisions, contracts, and spending?
Transparency is the key, and the effective use of Technology is an essential part of transparency. We need to be upfront with parents about the decisions the school system makes, the outside consultants MCPS pays, and the curriculum that is taught to their children. If the board and administration truly believe in those decisions, it shouldn’t be hidden – and I believe there are a number of technology strategies that could facilitate this transparency.
The Montgomery County Government has an easy-to-use open budget portal, which allows for the interactive breakout, exploration and detailing of spending for all parts of the county government. Unfortunately, the 46.4% of the budget allocated to MCPS allows for no further exploration, stating “Montgomery County Public Schools stores its General Ledger Data in a different database.” Detailed MCPS data should be made available and open, through this portal or other methods.
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)?
Studies and data have now proven that schools can be safely operated during such times of crisis, whether in-person or hybrid. Unless provided with actual data showing the real health risks to our students and teachers far exceeding the costs (increased mental health issues, lowered test scores, and increased violence), there is no reason to go fully virtual again.
Furthermore, we are a county of over a million people, with over 200 schools. The entire school system should have never gone all-virtual – instead, individual schools could have transitioned on/off as required, allowing for the county to better utilize teacher, health, and technology support on a per-school basis. We should avoid one-size-fits-all approaches.
We cannot elect the same people who reflexively advocated for endless virtual learning in the 2020-2021 school year, and trust that they won’t do the same thing during any future situation – we need a better balance of members going forward.
3 – Do you support the shift from balanced literacy to structured literacy/science of reading?
The educational debate between phonics-based instruction and “whole language” instruction has continued for decades, eventually resulting in the current “Balanced Literacy” compromise. While this approach works for the majority of students, some teachers have difficulty implementing parts of it, and those students with Dyslexia or other reading disabilities often struggle with this balanced approach. Structured Literacy has been advocated as a solution to these problems, being more explicit and structured, with greater interaction and feedback.
We need to follow the evolving research to make informed choices before making large instructional changes. Furthermore, we need to focus on the individual needs of each student, each school, each school cluster, and each community. County-wide changes to a fundamental aspect of education needs to be taken with great care, as they usually take years to implement, often requiring extensive re-training for already-overburdened teachers of currently-short-staffed schools.
While we can explore the benefits of such changes within specific schools (with populations that may most benefit from the approach), the primary focus of the school system must be the needs of individual students who are in our schools today, especially those who are struggling today, and need early diagnosis and instructional help today…not a decade from now.
4 – What is your plan for continued recovery from learning loss and proficiency issues related to covid and virtual?
First and foremost, we need to keep our schools open and safe. No more reflexive school closures based on politics instead of data. Stop portraying police as a problem, and return to viewing the police as a partner in keeping our schools safe.
We need to better utilize technology to assist in the recovery. We can design our technology infrastructure to focus on in-person education, while also providing lessons and materials (including a replay of that day’s classroom instruction) for students and parents to review. This allows students the ability to review something that was unclear to them, allows for students who are absent due to illness (or COVID) to continue instruction while recovering, allows for parents to assist as needed, and provides the transparency many parents have been calling for over the past few years.
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?
Education is essential work, and our teachers, paraeducators, and support staff need to be paid accordingly. The school board gave our teachers only a 3.35% cost of living raise, yet gave the superintendent a $368,000 compensation package, a $73,000 increase – a slap in the face to all of the frontline teachers who have worked hard over the past year. We need to fund teachers, not executives.
Furthermore, we cannot recruit and retain teachers if they are worried about their safety. Last year, the school board voted to strip funding for School Resource Officers – i.e. they voted to defund the police in Montgomery County Public Schools, putting our students at risk in order to virtue signal. Furthermore, this again had a disproportionate negative impact on the poor and minority communities they purport to help, who deserve safe schools.
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