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The state school board, which acts as the governance body for the Maryland Department of Education, will meet later this month to elect new leadership of its 12-member panel, the board president said this week.

The vote, which is scheduled to occur in a closed session during the board's July 23 meeting, comes following the death of Blair G. Ewing, who served as the panel's vice president for a year until he died of cancer Monday.

Ewing, who was 75, had attended state board meetings up until three weeks ago. He spent the last 10 days of his life in a Montgomery Hospice acute care center in Rockville.

Under state law, the school board's president and vice president serve one-year terms, but can be re-elected to the positions by the other board members.

The state school board sets the statewide policy for all school systems. It also acts as an arbitrator by voting on appeals that come from the local school level.

On Thursday, Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) appointed physicist Sylvester J. Gates Jr. of Prince George's County, PTA advocate Madhu Sidhu of Kent County and administrator Guffrie M. Smith Jr. of Calvert County to the state school board, replacing Dunbar Brooks, Richard L. Goodall and Karabelle A. L. Pizzigati, who were term-limited.

Ewing, who was appointed to the state board by O'Malley in 2007, will not be forgotten, state board members said.

"I thought he was always prepared," said state school board President James H. DeGraffenreidt Jr., who worked with Ewing for one year. "Even when he disagreed, he always set a positive tone."

Ewing often was a maverick on the state board.

In 2007, for instance, he was one of four board members who voted against the High School Assessments as a graduation requirement for the class of 2009. He argued that those students should not be required to pass the exams because the state education department had not perfected them yet. Also that year, he was the lone dissenting vote in an appeal from Montgomery County activists to keep open the district's secondary learning centers for special-needs students.

‘‘The Montgomery County school system had been arbitrary in the way they reached their decision," Ewing told The Gazette at the time. ‘‘People had a much abbreviated time period to speak to the issue. It came up in the superintendent's budget rather abruptly; there wasn't much notice of it."

Ewing, of Silver Spring, was not immune to controversy during his time with the state board. In late 2007, he and the other O'Malley appointees voted against reappointing Nancy S. Grasmick as state superintendent of schools.

Most recently, Ewing was one of two board members to vote in favor of Montgomery's request to waive its maintenance-of-effort requirement for fiscal 2010, which began Wednesday. Under maintenance-of-effort laws, counties must fund its school systems at least at the same level as the previous year.

DeGraffenreidt said that he and Ewing often would meet with senior staffers at the state education department to set the agenda for board meetings.

"He was a professional and dedicated all the way through the year we worked together," he said. "I really did like him and appreciated his dedication."

Dunbar Brooks recalled a time when Ewing took his wife to Italy for a vacation. While he was there, Ewing bumped into an educator and the two began talking about how to bring different education programs to the states, Brooks said.

"It didn't matter where he was, he was always thinking about education, even on a trip to Italy," Brooks said. "I don't know how his wife felt about that."

Brooks, the state school board's president when Ewing was appointed, also remembered him as a voracious reader. Board members have to read reams of papers, but "Blair said, ‘I love to read, send me everything you got.' He loved to study the issues."

Karabelle A. L. Pizzigati, who also worked with Ewing, said his support for early-childhood education had a great impact at the state level.

"He always raised very good questions about all matters that came to the board," Pizzigati said. "Blair was very key in suggesting direction and setting the benchmark."

Before his time on the state board, Ewing spent 22 years on the Montgomery County school board, including two stints as president. Pizzigati, a former PTA advocate in the county, had known Ewing since the late 1970s.

"I am exiting state board service," Pizzigati said, "and I will miss him as a colleague and a friend, and those coming on won't be as well served because he won't be there."