Birthdate and Place: January 31, 1964; Washington, D.C. Residence: Rockville, Maryland Family: Married to David Berthiaume; three children Education: Juris Doctor, Magna Cum Laude, Order of the Coif, Georgetown University Law Center, 1990; Masters of Science in Foreign Service, With Academic Distinction, Georgetown University, 1990; Bachelor of Arts, with High Distinction, University of Virginia, 1985 Professional Experience: Partner, Farthing & Farthing, 2005-present; Partner, Farthing, Farthing & Forgotson, 2003-2005; Associate, Margaret D. Farthing & Associates, 1993-2003; Attorney-Advisor (Temporary), U.S. Department of State, 1992-1993; Associate, Sidley & Austin, 1991-1993; Clerk, Hon. Richard J. Cardamone, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, 1990-1991. Community Experience: Current President, Friend of the Library, Rockville Chapter; Democratic Precinct Chair, Precinct 04-02; Active Participant, Rockville Town Center Action Team; Legal Aid Volunteer, Rockville Senior Center; Member, Peerless Rockville; Member, Maryvale Elementary School PTA; Cluster Co-Coordinator, Rockville High School Cluster, MCCPTA, 2007; Delegate, Beall Elementary School PTA, MCCPTA, 2005-2006; Member, Board of Trustees, Baptist Home for Children (now the National Center for Children and Families), Bethesda, MD, 1994-1995. Key Issues: Ensuring We Hire a Top Administrative Team, Communication, Flexibility and Equity. Web site: www.laura4boe.com E-mail address: Lauraforboe@comcast.net Link to state Board of Elections campaign finance database

Board of Education, Dist. 2

Laura V. Berthiaume

1) Since Dr. Weast will not be seeking renewal of his contract in 2011, hiring a top-notch Superintendent to lead our public schools in the future.

2) Improving communications at all levels of the system, ensuring that all groups are made to feel welcome as participants at the table.

3) Continuing to strive to meet all the educational needs of our very diverse student population.

Q: How would you rate the performance of the current school board: excellent, good, fair, or poor? Why?

I would give the current school board a good rating. Many excellent initiatives and policies have been instituted over the last several years, but there is substantial room for improvement in the Board’s exercise of oversight and in ensuring the responsiveness of the school system to the needs of all students. I commend the Board’s efforts to eradicate barriers to programs, particularly at the High School level, as well as its innovative approach to Middle School Reform, and the institution of reduced class sizes for K-2 at focus schools. I see opportunities to increase parent and student satisfaction with the school system by revising the Board’s schedule to provide sufficient time to allow the public at large and parent groups to comment on the Capital and Operating Budgets, and for Board to respond to those comments at more than just the margins. The Board and parents have been blind-sided recently by major changes (particularly with regard to Special Education programs) that suddenly appear in the budget without having been sufficiently vetted through stakeholder input, public comment, and full Board consideration. The Board, as an elected body, bears the responsibility of formulating policy, with the advice and input of the Superintendent. The Board needs to assert itself to ensure that it receives the necessary information from the administration to fulfill its role.

Q: Superintendent Jerry D. Weast has said he doesn’t expect to extend his contract beyond 2011. What qualities, skills, and expectations would you seek in a new Superintendent?

Qualities and Skills:

1) A person who is deeply committed to the principle that the people to which he or is she is most accountable are the students themselves.

2) A person who is deeply committed to the principle that the best measurement of accountability is that school where the children are having the least success, and that school where the facility is in the worst repair.

3) A person who genuinely wants to turn out graduates who are capable of critical thought and who understand where they are in terms of U.S. history, world history, culture, and current events, as well as graduates who can write a good essay, spell, do algebra, explain the U.S. Constitution, and understand statistics well enough to discern when they are being manipulated or skewed.

4) A politically savvy person who has the skills to navigate all of the interests of all of the stakeholders in the system and bring them together as much as possible to achieve the highest degree of success for each child given his or her ability.

5) A person who respects the value of fair and transparent process.

6) A person who has a drive to search out best practices wherever they may be, and to bring our school system forward to places that it may be hard to imagine in terms of technology, science-based educational methods, and new models of learning.

7) A person who is open to flexibility and to providing a variety of programs that engage, challenge, and invite our students to learn, but who will not be taken by the latest fad being sold by politicians or educational consultants.

8) A person who is committed not only to having our students learn content, but also to having them develop emotional intelligence, social skills, basic financial acumen, the ability to predict consequences from their choices and to regulate their behavior accordingly, and an understanding of their own learning styles and strengths and weaknesses.

9) A person who is devoted to ensuring a safe and attractive learning environment for every student.

Q: Do the superintendent and the unions have too much influence over the school board?

The Board and the Superintendent need to respect and trust each other – no school system can do well without a Board and Superintendent that deal openly with each other. I think a majority of the current Board sees the need for some changes in the relationship with Dr. Weast, as indicated by the fact that the Board has begun to assert itself by hiring its own staff member and by making clear thatsurprise moves like the proposed relocation of Stephen Knolls will not go forward. I understand that a revision of the Board’s annual schedule to allow the Board sufficient time to have a wider impact on the budget once it is proposed by the Superintendent is also being considered. One area that still needs improvement is communication — the administration should view Board requests for information pertaining to the school system that it oversees, not as meddling but as the Board doing its job.

With regard to the unions, there has been a deliberate decision by the Board and the Superintendent to bring in the unions, together with other major stakeholders in the system, as partners at the table in shaping the budget. That appears to be working well so far. The agreement by the unions that everyone should be accountable — that although bad teachers, administrators, and staff should be given the opportunity and the support to improve, they should be released from the system if they cannot meet that challenge — is a better system than in many jurisdictions. While I do not think the unions have too much influence over the Board, I do think there are other groups that are underrepresented in the decision-making process.

Q: Is the county funding for schools too much, about right or too little? If too little, where would you find additional money?

Too little, particularly with regard to the capital budget. The school system is still trying to catch up with the tremendous growth in Montgomery County over the last decade. We have a huge maintenance backlog. Some of our students attend an elementary school that has over 800 students enrolled, while others are attending school in trailers, and others still attend schools that still have asbestos tiles and ‘‘open-classroom” walls from the 1970’s. We are moving into a new era in which we will need to integrate technology throughout our curriculum in order to graduate students who are prepared for a global economy, and that is going to cost money. We have made significant advances in teacher training and certification, but there is still much to be done — particularly in the area of middle school math. We need more bilingual services, as we serve an increasingly diverse population. Our special needs budget can also be expected to grow.

Where would I get the money? I understand that in the face of a potential recession and projected deficits, finding the money for education is difficult, but we need to remember that education is central to our continued economic vitality, both nationally and locally. The County Council has recently taken actions that will eventually bring more funding to our schools and that will dampen the impact of growth on an already strained system, and I applaud those actions. Our County Executive, Ike Leggett, is clearly committed to meeting our educational needs, and appears to be willing to cut other areas of the budget if necessary. Montgomery County’s delegation has a responsibility to bring home more money from Annapolis — our percentage of state funding is already less than a quarter of our budget, while other counties receive well over half of their educational funding from the state. Education funding needs to be more of a priority for our state Senators and Delegates.

Q: Do you think the system for renovating schools is adequate, or does it need changing?

It needs changing. The Board’s prioritization over the last decade of getting every child a seat (by building additions and new schools), has meant that we have a maintenance backlog that has particularly affected our older schools. While the system did a survey of our schools and ranked them according to need for renovation, that ranking was done long ago, and no re-assessment has been undertaken since then. While new schools that were not ranked may be added to the list in the future, there is no plan to review the ranking of older schools that were placed at the end of the line and that have fallen too far through the cracks. There is also a perception that some schools are treated differently than others because they know how to ‘‘jump the line.” The renovation schedule does not take into account the demographics of the school population, so more affluent students in high growth areas may be enjoying new school facilities while children in poverty may be attending schools that badly need renovation. This is an area I believe the Board needs to revisit.

Q: How well are the county’s high school consortia working to raise student achievement?

I think they are working well. We have had large increases in the numbers of minority students taking and passing Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams, and that is an objective measure that cannot be manipulated. However, the percentage of students who are academically ineligible to participate in sports is an indicator that there are still far too many students who are not achieving academic success.

Q: There is a strong focus on improving the county’s middle school curriculum. How well is the middle school reform working to raise student achievement?

It is too early to tell. Only five schools had the benefit of Middle School Reform this year, and it is still being rolled out to selected schools. It will need to be in place for a few years before we can truly know whether it is achieving measurable success. We always need to be sure that what appears to be academic success — for example in the number of students taking Algebra -– is not merely a dumbing down of the curriculum. I will be interested to compare student achievement and student satisfaction at the Middle School Reform schools with that at the Middle School Magnet Consortium Schools. Also, as with every other level of our system, we need to be sure that we are educating the whole child, not just focusing our sole attention on academic content.

Q: Are too many students being pushed into advanced placement and honors classes without proper preparation?

No. The complaints I have heard are that too many parents who want their children to take advanced placement and honors classes have been told that those students should not or cannot take those classes. I think we should provide parents with objective assessments regarding their child’s capability and proper placement, but children ‘‘on the bubble” between regular and honors classes should be afforded the opportunity to attempt the work. We should also be very clear in communicating, as early as third grade, what sort of courses, preparation, and student performance will be necessary to enable the child to succeed in advanced placement and honors courses. We need much more — and much more direct — communication with parents about what the system offers and how they can access it. This communication needs to take place not just at an invitational forum that requires parents and students to ‘‘opt in” but as part of mandatory, person to person communication between local school administrators and parents.

Q: The school system’s health curriculum includes discussions of homosexuality and demonstrations of contraception use. Would you change the policy or let it stand?

I would let it stand.

Q: What do you think about the board’s relationship with the community?

Our school system needs the support of the whole community, and our community expects an engaged and caring school board. For that reason, board member availability — appearing at MCCPTA functions, making visits to schools and PTA’s, meeting with citizens groups and parent groups — is a critical part of the job. As I have indicated above, communication between the Board and the community needs improvement, as does communication between the school system as a whole and the community. Part of the answer is ensuring that the system is set up so that various groups such as the special needs community, the gifted and talented community, minority groups, and even local PTA’s, feel they have a voice and that their voices are respected. It is not enough to provide a forum at which these groups can speak, or advisory groups within which they can participate, if the speakers feel that their words are merely trees falling in an empty forest, never receiving a real response.

Q: Does the County Council have too much, too little, or not enough oversight of the school system?

The County Council has been grappling with how much oversight of the school system it should undertake while also properly respecting the role of the Board of Education. Both the County Council and the Board want the same things: student achievement, community support, a transparent budget, and an efficient system that holds down costs. In this regard, a restructuring of the MCPS Capital Budget to enable better oversight is overdue — too much of it is not subject to public oversight in any meaningful way, and the categories themselves are difficult to understand and oversee. I believe that Council President Michael Knapp understands this problem and will work with the Board of Education to bring adequate oversight into place at the appropriate levels.

Q: What should the school system do to improve performance of struggling students?

An ounce of early intervention is worth a pound of summer school or the imposition of academic ineligibility. If funds were available, I would strongly support universal Pre-K, which would help students arrive in kindergarten without already being behind. We need better and earlier interventions when a child is clearly headed in the wrong direction. As soon as first grade, if it is clear that a child is encountering difficulty at any aspect of school — whether it is in reading or in being able to behave him or herself at lunch or on the playground — we should require teachers and school administration to aggressively investigate what barriers that child is experiencing and bring in supports for that child, including tutoring, a comprehensive developmental review, or an appropriate mentor. I would also support special administrative arrangements for schools with high rates of children in poverty — an administrative team bound to a minimum of four years at the school, with bonuses for experienced principals and teachers who agree to accept a contract at that school. We also need to do a better job overall of creating a school culture that children can adopt with pride — one that counters some of the values that our children are confronted with outside of school. Our system should be clear about the fact that children are expected to buy into a set of values that make school workable for everyone — discipline, respect for others, respect for learning, and understanding that we all have a duty to be prepared to participate in our own society. Those same values are central to any child’s academic success.

Q: Do you think the school system is doing enough to meet the needs of special education students?

No. One of the decisions the Board took recently without sufficient exploration was the closure of the Secondary Learning Centers. While mainstreaming special education students so they can have a full range of opportunities is a worthy overall goal, inclusion works for some children, but not for all. Our system needs to be flexible enough to meet the needs of all types of children. Furthermore, we cannot ignore the input of those who know best what their child needs — the parents. We need to respect that schools are more than classrooms — they are communities, both of learners and of parents. For children with special needs – whether for special education or for enriched and accelerated instruction – the formation of community around those special needs is a significant benefit that cannot always be found in a regular classroom. Parent to parent communication about community and summer programs, exchanges of information about other resources, comparisons of experiences both inside and outside of the school system, and sheer sympathy between families as they experience the challenges of a child with special needs or with a different learning style are all important and beneficial side effects of having a dedicated program. As the closures are occurring over six years, the Board has an opportunity to track and measure whether the students’ lives and education are being improved by the decision to close the Learning Centers, and to identify potential sub-groups who may still need separate facilities.

Q: Are the schools safe for students and teachers? If not, what should be done?

They are not safe enough. Safety covers such a wide range of topics: bullying, fire safety, assault, child abduction by divorced parents or strangers, pedestrian safety while walking to school, gang violence, infectious disease, pedophiles who seek jobs in our schools, and school shooters, among others. Safety concerns start when a child gets on a bus or walks out the door to school in the morning and continue through after-school activities and all the way home. As a current MCPS parent, I am committed to making sure that every child is safe while in the custody of our schools. It is not possible to put into one paragraph all of the steps that need to be taken to improve school safety, and even if it were, school safety is always an ongoing process as new threats appear. One area I would like to ensure we address is infectious disease. New diseases are appearing as international travel increases and as global warming expands the geographic range of diseases we never used to worry about. While our most recent experiences are with MRSA, there are other diseases for which we also need to prepare. Our school system must implement and emphasize basic hygienic steps to impede the transmission of disease. We also need to adopt better reporting and tracking of outbreaks in our schools.