The Same Opportunity

It’s been eleven months since I entered the House chamber.

The action we took today will have an impact for a decade and beyond.

 

We adjourned early last March because of the pandemic.

Committees have been meeting virtually for the last three weeks.

Today was our first floor session.

We voted to override Governor Hogan’s veto of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.

 

The need to reform our pre-K-12 public school system is even greater than when we passed this bill last March.

Children of color, children who live in impoverished circumstances have fallen even further behind their contemporaries.

They lack access to the Internet.  Their  parents can’t work from home and assist in their schooling.

Addressing that disparity remains at the heart of the Blueprint.

Implementing the Blueprint is an investment in programs that have worked in other states and abroad.

Expanding pre-kindergarten to three-year olds means children will come to kindergarten ready to learn.  Better training and higher pay will keep better teachers in the classroom.

Many of our students and their families will get the help they need to address social problems that hinder their classroom performance.  Students will choose either college credit courses or a career track by 10th grade.

I know how important my public school education was to me.  We need to provide that same opportunity to all of our state’s children.

Our living messengers

“We didn’t lose him, mind you – we gained so much knowledge from this man,” Christopher Johnson said of Congressman Elijah Cummings.

https://www.marylandmatters.org/2019/10/18/baltimore-mourns-its-native-son-and-champion/

Elijah Cummings and I were in the 1982 class of newly elected members of the House of Delegates. We knew each other from high school.

Elijah said, “City College was the first time I was in an integrated environment as an equal.”  He became an effective and passionate leader pursuing equality for all of us. We worked together to protect voting rights.

“Our children are our living messengers to a future we will never see.” I heard Elijah say that many times. Perhaps you did as well.

A quality education for all of our children, regardless of their background, is the goal of the Blueprint For Maryland’s future. It’s the work product of a commission chaired by Brit Kirwan, the highly respected former chancellor of the University System of Maryland.

This is the most important issue before the General Assembly. What standards do we set for our public schools and how do we fund them?

As you know, we’ve taken a big step forward in preserving the Preakness at Pimlico and redeveloping most of that land for commercial, residential, medical, and recreational uses.

What I did to bring this about is at http://www.delsandy.com/key-issues/pimlico-and-the-preakness/

 

Half-baked proposals and common sense solutions

This is what Governor Hogan said about school funding in a prepared speech last Saturday:

With little thought, the legislature rushed through the so-called Kirwan plan, which will require billions and billions more in mandated spending increases for county and state taxpayers.

They took this action without any regard to funding formulas and with absolutely no plan whatsoever for how any of your counties or the state taxpayers could possibly be able to pay for any of it.

These well-meaning but half-baked and fiscally irresponsible proposals will cause an $18.7 billion state budget deficit over the next five years, and will force a crushing $6,200 tax hike on the average Maryland family.

https://governor.maryland.gov/2019/08/19/maco-summer-conference-address/

This is what he should have said:

Education is our state’s Number One obligation.  Our state constitution requires that the General Assembly establish “a thorough and efficient System of Free Public Schools.”

At the same time, we cannot make a commitment that would overburden our middle class taxpayers without thoroughly examining the changes that have been proposed by the Kirwan Commission.

Brit Kirwan is one of our country’s leading educators.

We can learn more about what his Commission is proposing by putting aside our partisan differences.

In his speech on Saturday, the Governor also said of his accomplishments as Governor:

We debated, discussed, and reasoned together, honestly and productively, with integrity and sincere purpose.

Together, we sought out bipartisan, common sense solutions that worked for the people of our state.

With our children’s educational future at stake, it’s time to do just that.

“We just want to feel safe, period.”

A disturbing account of Baltimore’s murder rate and the relationship between the Police Department and the African-American community was the cover story in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine.

This is how the article ends:

The meeting was standing room only. “We just want to feel safe, period,” Monique Washington, president of the Edmondson Village Community Association, told Harrison. “Our people are in fear, and we’re tired.”

An hour into the forum [with new Police Commissioner Harrison], a neighborhood resident named Renee McCray stepped up to the microphone. She described how bewildering it had been to accompany a friend downtown, near the tourist-friendly Inner Harbor, one night a few months earlier. “The lighting was so bright. People had scooters. They had bikes. They had babies in strollers. And I said: ‘What city is this? This is not Baltimore City.’ Because if you go up to Martin Luther King Boulevard” — the demarcation between downtown and the west side — “we’re all bolted in our homes, we’re locked down.” She paused for a moment to deliver her point. “All any of us want is equal protection,” she said.

It was a striking echo of the language in the Department of Justice [that resulted in a consent decree governing police conduct] the activists’ condemnations of the police following Gray’s death. Back then, the claims were of overly aggressive policing; now residents were pleading for police officers to get out of their cars, to earn their pay — to protect them.

You could look at this evolution as demonstrating an irreconcilable conflict, a tension between Shantay Guy and Tony Barksdale never to be resolved. But the residents streaming into these sessions with Harrison weren’t suggesting that. They were not describing a trade-off between justice and order. They saw them as two parts of a whole and were daring to ask for both.

 

I represent neighborhoods where people have babies in strollers. I represent Monique Washington and her neighborhood, where the residents live in fear.

I represent constituents whose primary concern is the injustice of unconstitutional police tactics. I represent constituents whose primary concern is the crime in their community.

What am I doing to address these problems?

I will continue to go to bat for a constituent or a neighborhood group with a complaint about police conduct or public safety.  I will advocate for additional resources to make our neighborhoods safer – more police, better policing, and other safety programs.

This session, I supported legislation allowing  Johns Hopkins  to hire police at a time when there are 500 vacancies  in the City police force. The future of the Police Training Academy in Northwest Baltimore is uncertain. My 41st District colleagues and I have written Mayor Catherine Pugh about this matter.

I opposed placing armed police officers inside school buildings because we must invest in our students instead. The long-term solution is public education. I’ve written before about the Kirwan Commission recommendations. I will redouble my efforts to see that additional money is spent wisely in our public schools.

Baltimore’s future is at stake.

I welcome your thoughts.

Race to the Tots – Continued

You don’t have to be the lead sponsor of a bill.

Not if you can legitimately say that you played a role in moving public policy in the same direction – the right direction, as the bill.

Race to the Tots was the name Senator Bill Ferguson gave to our 2013 bill creating a competitive grant program to stimulate innovation and expand access to high-quality early childhood education.

House Bill 925 did not pass, but it set the stage for a bill that did.

The next year, the Prekindergarten Expansion Act of 2014 was introduced by the O’Malley Administration. Public and private providers could bid for $4.3 million in grants to stimulate innovation and expand access to high-quality early childhood education.

The Kirwan Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education has recommended that the State provide universal access to public and private prekindergarten for all four year olds and low-income three year olds.

That has prompted the introduction of House Bill 1415, which would mandate funding for the Pre-Kindergarten Expansion Grant Program. This program was created by the 2014 O’Malley bill.

I’m not a sponsor of this year’s bill, but I will work with pre-K advocates to ensure it passes.

Mandating pre-K-12 spending and improving performance

Two visions of education will be considered by the General Assembly this session and next year as well.

Last week, Governor Hogan declared that we needed the Office of the State Education Investigator General to investigate “complaints of unethical, unprofessional, or illegal conduct relating” in our public schools.

At his budget press conference yesterday, the governor stated, “The budget leaves nearly $1 billion in reserves and continues – for the fourth straight year – to fund K-12 education at an all-time record level.”

Our public schools were also the subject of a legislative hearing yesterday.

Brit Kirwan, the former Chancellor of the University System of Maryland, is now chairing the Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education.

Before yesterday, if you had asked me what the Commission is studying, I would have told you, “the formula that determines how much money the state provides our 24 local school systems every year.”

It’s that formula, written into law, that mandated Governor Hogan’s record funding for the fourth straight year.

But that’s not all the Kirwan Commission is doing.

Our students are not performing well on assessments of what they’ve learned, Kirwan said.

We must better prepare teachers for the classroom and expand the number of high quality teachers and principals. Schools serving poorer students are underfunded.

Accountability will be crucial to persuading the public to bear these costs, he added.

In the public debate that we will have, will our focus be on improving our students’ performance or penalizing those administrators who have failed?

I’m hoping and betting on the former.

  • My Key Issues:

  • Pimlico and The Preakness
  • Our Neighborhoods
  • Pre-Kindergarten
  • Lead Paint Poisoning