All members of the Prince George’s County Board of Education’s ethics panel will resign Friday, almost a year after producing reports critical of some board members and causing mass dissension in the county.
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The panel’s chairman, Gregory Morton Sr., wrote in an April 3 letter that the en masse resignation was because members faced an “unanticipated, disruptive impact” to their personal and professional lives through the course of their term. The letter was signed by each member of the panel and addressed to school board chair Juanita Miller.
It is the latest event in years of turbulence within the D.C. suburb’s school system. Last year, the ethics panel was at the center of one of the school board’s most contentious episodes after it authored error-riddled reports that targeted a more liberal majority of the board’s elected members, including accusations of steering contracts, doing political favors and engaging in a quid pro quo with a labor union. Those members fought back by hiring lawyers and calling out inaccurate details in the reports. The reports led to extreme division between factions on the board.
Error-riddled ethics reports on school board create political firestorm in Prince George’s County
The ethics panel members — residents who are unpaid volunteers approved by the school board for three-year terms — wrote in their resignation letter that they “stayed the course and did the right thing despite adverse treatment by some board members and the press.” They wrote that they were tasked with an unprecedented number of complaints and requests during their term, all while working with “a school board, seen by many, including the state [board of education], as dysfunctional” that had “uncooperative respondents.” They said they were falsely accused of leaking the reports after copies were sent in unmarked envelopes to the homes of multiple county politicians last year.
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The ethics panel also noted in the resignation letter that they dealt with an “investigation” by the state inspector general of education, but the letter provides no details about it. Maryland Inspector General of Education Richard P. Henry said Wednesday he could not confirm or deny the existence of any investigation.
Morton confirmed that all panelists are resigning and added that they stand proudly by the reports they produced. He declined to comment further and referred other questions to Miller.
Since December, multiple members have stepped down from the school board — some citing dysfunction that was exacerbated by the board’s hybrid makeup of elected and appointed members. Former elected school board members Raaheela Ahmed (District 5), Belinda Queen (District 6) and Edward Burroughs III (District 8) all have stepped down to run for different roles in public office.
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Most recently, appointed member Paul Monteiro resigned last week to accept a role in the Biden administration as the director of the community relations service for the Department of Justice.
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Replacements for the school board’s vacant seats will be appointed by Prince George’s County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks (D).
But the school board is in charge of finding replacements for its ethics panel members. Miller said Wednesday that the application process is underway. She told board members at a meeting last week about the panelists’ resignation, she said.
She declined to comment further on the ongoing dynamics of the board, stating that The Washington Post was part of the problem in the ethics panel exercising its duties. She added that she sympathized with the ethics panel members, who did “extensive research” on their reports and whose integrity was unfairly “ostracized” by other members of the board.
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But the reports had numerous errors confirmed by The Post, including the history of the board’s contracting; the work a lobbyist did; and the details of a publicly adopted board resolution.
“The Washington Post is trying to sell papers or gain readership, you do what you do. It did not help the citizens of the county,” Miller said Wednesday. “These people have reputations to uphold … they did not need this kind of harassment or undermining of their work.”
Burroughs, who was one of the subjects of the ethics panel’s report, said Tuesday the panel had “egregious lies and mischaracterizations” and the en masse resignation should not absolve members from any consequences.
Shayla Adams-Stafford, an elected board member representing District 4 and another subject of the report, added that it was under the ethics panel’s purview to maintain the confidentiality of its reports, but somehow, they were intentionally sent out to public officials. There wasn’t any adverse treatment by board members, she said, but the incident was “the breeding ground for contentious debate and discussion.” She said she plans to focus on building an ethics panel in the future that has public trust.
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The ethics panel wrote in the resignation letter that they trusted current “dysfunction” on the board would be addressed by the county’s state legislators and a task force put together by Alsobrooks that evaluated the school board’s makeup. That task force released a report in February that recommended the school board become an all-elected board. The Maryland General Assembly approved legislation on Monday that would do so by 2024.