Update: (River Hill) Money (Still) Makes the World Go ‘Round

I wrote back in late August that of the $167,000 raised thus far by Board of Education candidates and PACs in the 2020 election cycle, roughly half of it has come from a single high school catchment area - River Hill High School. I surmised that River Hill was putting its financial might into a slate of anti-redistricting candidates. Another round of campaign finance reports are out as of yesterday, and that story hasn't changed. Except that the numbers have become even more mind-boggling....
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Our Teachers Deserve Better

My mother is a retired Maryland public school teacher. When she was a young teacher back in the ‘70s, she was the newspaper adviser in the high school where she taught foreign language. In 1975, two years after the landmark Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision, her students wanted to write a piece in the school newspaper about sex education, birth control, and abortion. Believing strongly in the First Amendment, my mother allowed them to write and publish the piece despite such topics being t...
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Hall of Shame – October 17, 2020

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who will tell you your fly is open, and those who will laugh at you because your fly is open. Yesterday, District 1 Board of Education candidate Matthew Molyett discovered a leak of his internal campaign data and materials. A local organization shared the data and materials with its members to solicit volunteers to assist the campaign. A bad-faith actor then created a fake Facebook profile and posted a link to the data and materials on the p...
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Hall of Shame, GOP Edition – October 10, 2020

During Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate between Senator Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence, I came across a Facebook post by a local GOP activist who is one of the ringleaders of Reopen Howard County, also known as the Christina Delmont-Small, Sezin Palmer, and Yun Lu fan club. The post was a live commentary on the debate, and the misogynoir directed at Senator Harris solidified my view that racism and hatred are a feature, not a bug, of the Republican Party. “Nasty bitch,”...
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Drawing Red Lines

The esteemed moderator of Howard County Neighbors United, who is locally famous for his verbosity and pedantry, recently posted this uncharacteristically terse criticism of District 4 Board of Education candidate Jen Mallo. He took issue with Ms. Mallo’s statement in a recent candidate forum that “During redistricting, we saw groups that wanted to draw red lines around certain communities,” his objection being that the use of a phrase that describes racist housing policy perpetuates the “divis...
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