By:
On:
In: CEOs, County Council, Education & Culture, Incident Response, Local Government, MCPS, Public Safety, Safety, SROs

Last week on Friday April 19, 2024, a trespasser at John F. Kennedy High School (MCPS Silver Spring, MD) wielded a knife during related to altercation involving a student. Concern MCPS is Downplaying Incident We received these videos from someone concerned that the letter from MCPS downplayed the incident byContinue Reading

By:
On:
In: MCPS, MPIA, Safety, School Funding, Transportation

April 23, 2024 Earlier this year, MCPS announced that their school bus tracking app would be launched this semester and that the Pilot was underway with families at 10 schools. Last week, MCPS issued a statement about the cancellation of the release of the bus tracking app. In this letter,Continue Reading

By:
On:
In: 2024 Elections, Board Of Elections, BOE, CEOs, Drugs and Alcohol, Elections, Free Events, Hate / Bias Incidents, Incident Response, Interviews, Local Government, MCPS, Political Interviews, Restorative Justice, Safety, SROs, Testing, Voting

April 18, 2024 We hosted the our first ever in person Moderately MOCO event on April 15 – a Board of Education candidate forum which you can watch here or click below. It is the month leading up to the May 14 Primary Election and you can see a collectionContinue Reading

By:
On:
In: Board Of Elections, BOE, Community Feedback, County Council, Local Government, MCPS

We have our first Moderately MOCO in person event which is a 2024 Board of Education Candidate Forum taking place on April 15 at the County Council building. We hope to see you there. See here for Parking and Directions information to the County Council building. Parking is free afterContinue Reading

By:
On:
In: BOE, Community Feedback, County Council, Education & Culture, Government, Local Government, MCPS, Montgomery County Police Department, Policing, Public Funding, Public Safety, Safety, School Funding, Special Education, Transportation

April 8th, 2024 – This testimony was given to the County Council on the FY2025 operating budget Hello my name is Jason Makstein and I run the blog Moderately MOCO but today I am testifying as a community advocate about various items in the operating budgets. My focus will beContinue Reading

By:
On:
In: County Council, District Court, Lawsuits, Local Government, Office of the Inspector General (OIG), Parks and Planning, Planning Board

March 13, 2024 In September 2023, the Montgomery County Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found misconduct of one of the County Council employees. The letter from the OIG stated that $11,490 of reservation fees were obtained and never paid for: “The investigation revealed that in 2022 and 2023, theContinue Reading

By:
On:
In: Administrators, BOE, Community Feedback, Community Reports, MCPS, Superintendent

March 10, 2024 – Anonymous Op-ed What does MCPS have in common with the old Soviet Union? Both were or are good at “disappearing” top staff. The USSR was famous for air-brushing the disfavored out of photographs or even paintings. MCPS simply wipes their names from the organizational chart withContinue Reading

By:
On:
In: Community Feedback, Community Reports, County Council, Local Government, Montgomery County Police Department, Policing, Public Safety

March 8, 2024 This was sent in as a follow up to Opinion: Defending Effective Policing: The Case Against Restricting Consent Searches and Bill 2-24 – Moderately MOCO following the County Council Public Hearing on the bill. Any councilmember who is for Councilmember Jawando’s Bill 2-24 must be prepared toContinue Reading

By:
On:
In: Local Government, MCPS, MCPS Enrollment, School Funding

Background and Source Data The state of Maryland reports on per-pupil expenditures Maryland reports on per-pupil expenditures and defines them as follows: “School-level per-pupil expenditures are local education agency (LEA) operating expenditures directly attributed to schools or allocated to schools based on certain criteria and reported as a per-pupil orContinue Reading