Is MCPS still a premier school district?

What happened to MCPS?

What happened to Montgomery County Public Schools? The county leaders FOX 5 spoke with still believe this is the premier school district, but want some serious changes.

ROCKVILLE, Md. - What happened to Montgomery County Public Schools?

It’s always been the state’s premier school district with more than half of its $3.17 billion budget coming from taxpayer dollars.

Montgomery County’s public school system is part of the pitch when it comes to drawing new businesses and big companies to the area.

The county leaders FOX 5 spoke with still believe this is the premier school district, but want some serious changes.

A lot has happened since Dr. Monifa McKnight became interim superintendent. Here are some of the issues that have occurred since she took the job.

OCTOBER 2021 – County football games were moved to earlier times due to fighting in the stands.
JANUARY 2021 – School leaders spent at least a week answering upset parents over the MCPS 5% COVID outbreak metric that closed schools.
JANUARY 2022 – About a month before Dr. McKnight was voted superintendent, the teachers union gave her a vote of no confidence over the handling of COVID-19 school policies.
JANUARY 2022 – Later that month, the county would see its first shooting inside a high school.
2022 to 2023 – Parents protest and initiate legal clashes over the school system’s handling of LGBTQ books.
JANUARY 2023 – After complaints of little to no transparency, MCPS and county leaders announced a fentanyl crisis within the schools and community.

Some of these issues predate McKnight. This past September, MCPS was ordered to pay what was reported to be the largest settlement of its kind in the state — nearly $10 million to the four victims of the 2017-2018 football hazing sexual assaults case at Damascus High School.

Another 4 million dollar settlement was paid out to a former Gaithersburg athlete weeks later.

Former MCPS Superintendent Joshua Starr, who now works in education advocacy, told FOX 5 that the superintendent’s job has become a lot harder thanks to COVID, with more people polarized.

He also said he wrote about some of his experiences when he got to MCPS.

"I can’t speak to what’s going on now because I haven’t been in the system, but the culture I inherited back in 2011 was not very transparent," he said. "It was – there was this sense of, you know, we’re MCPS. We’re the best. We can do no wrong."

We also spoke with a longtime victim’s advocate, Jennifer Gross, who said both she and her children are products of MCPS. She was very critical of Starr’s work but also used MCPS, the Catholic Church, and Boy Scouts of America in the same breath.

"I want to be clear here, I’m not bashing the systems as a whole. But I am telling you those three organizations as a whole – they care more about their reputations than they do about the safety of children and employees," Gross said. "That’s the problem."

Gross said that in some 30 years of working with abuse victims, the victim’s suffering is compounded by institutional betrayal – and the belief that it could have been prevented.