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Parents call for ouster of principal

Thurgood Marshall leader questions tactics of her opponents, seeks resolution

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

A group of parents is calling for new leadership at Gaithersburg’s Thurgood Marshall Elementary School, saying Principal Mary Wilson has inadequately dealt with mounting concerns over bullying, discipline and communication with parents.

‘‘It’s being mismanaged, and who’s going to be at fault if something really bad happens?” said Chris Zandish, one of the concerned parents. ‘‘We can’t stand by, we have a responsibility to our kids, we have a responsibility to each other’s children.”

Worries at the 572-student school are reaching a crescendo after several meetings organized last month that each drew more than 100 parents.

The president of the school’s Parent-Teacher Association, Bonnie Lawhorn, resigned last week, frustrated by eight months of ongoing talks with Wilson and the county school system that she says have not produced real results, more than a year after she began to see problems surface.

‘‘Then this year, the first week of school: problems,” she said. ‘‘And they just weren’t addressed. And they continued and snowballed and we’re hitting this brick wall of MCPS and we don’t know what to do.”

The group of concerned parents is circulating a petition describing ‘‘a school in crisis.” As of last Wednesday, the petition had 332 signatures urging ‘‘new and effective” leadership.

The school system had already brought in a mediator and formed an advisory committee of parents.

Wilson, the principal, is scheduling an open meeting with parents at the school on May 18.

Now in her seventh full year as principal, Wilson draws a distinctly different picture in explaining the commotion.

She turns the focus back on the parent group, describing them as a small group of parents preoccupied with the changing character of the school, which has in the last several years come to include more African-American students.

Wilson is African-American. Almost half of the students at the school are white.

‘‘We are a community where we have an apartment community and where we have homes,” she explained. ‘‘Since I’ve been here, I’ve been trying to bring that community together. A lot of the problem from my end looks like they have to do with the demographic shifts,” the principal said.

Wilson said that if anything, it is the parent group that is using aggressive tactics to agitate the school community and intimidate other parents into signing the petition.

‘‘Bullying is bullying, and I’ve seen that in this group of parents,” she said. ‘‘I think they need to be concerned with how they address other parents.”

The parent group bristles at Wilson having drawn a racial line.

‘‘This has nothing to do with the children, this is all about the management of our school,” Lawhorn said. ‘‘Kids need guidance; they’re not getting it at that school.”

LaVerne Kimball, community superintendent for the Quince Orchard, Northwest, Poolesville and Seneca Valley clusters, hosted the most recent meeting after becoming involved in October, when the school formed the advisory committee with the mediator to address a number of issues.

She insists that the committee was not formed to evaluate Wilson’s performance, nor does she characterize the situation as escalating.

She did not think it was ‘‘appropriate” to discuss communication between parents and Wilson, the school’s high rate of teacher turnover and the effect on the school environment.

She also found it ‘‘inappropriate” to consider a timeline for resolution.

A 2005 survey of 71 parents at the school, part of an annual evaluation the school system does of all its schools, does weigh into the process, she said.

The survey shows a below-average parent approval of Wilson, earning 72.7 percent approval last year, down from 84.8 percent the year before.

The county average for all elementary schools last year was 90.9 percent approval.

‘‘In terms of that survey, that does signify that there are some issues that need to be addressed,” said Kimball.

The school issued nine suspensions for the 2003-2004 school year, and despite the increased concern from some parents about bullying, issued no suspensions for the 2004-2005 school year.

The number of bullying reports, which parents file with their child’s school, were not available. County schools spokesman Brian Edwards said that the individual bullying reports cannot be broken out from the one large report the county sends to the Maryland State Department of Education.

Wilson remains optimistic that with continued dialogue, the situation has not gotten so far out of hand as to have a lasting effect.

‘‘We have a good school and a school that has so much great potential,” she said. ‘‘Sometimes there’s a group of parents that are putting a negative twist to things that we’re doing. But I think we have an excellent chance of having the kind of school that we want to have here.”