The first 4 years we worked hard at tightening the belt as we received very little new funding. I helped the renegotiation of the debt that the previous Board had incurred for the financing of the central office building. This move will save hundreds of thousands of dollars over the life of the loan. We also went through and out sourced the printing services of FCPS also saving a lot of money. We formed a workgroup with FCC, Frederick County Government and other local agencies to see where we could work together to get costs of goods and services down. This has worked very well. In looking at transparency, when I got on the Board the budget was not easy to go through and many items were not even budgeted for such as technology.

We have worked hard to break the budget out and make sure that things that are recurring costs are categorized and show up in the budget. Our fiscal services area has received numerous awards for their performance in the past several years. The second area I focused on was communication between FCPS and the public. We have worked very hard to make sure the public is a part of every major decision made through hearings and input received. I am very proud of the effort of our staff in working through the decision on the new Frederick High School project. Many meetings were held with the public and feedback was used to develop the final plan. Because of this hard work it was well received by the public. We will continue to work hard in this area.

If reelected, my main areas of focus are safety and staff compensation. In today’s world, it has never been more important to look at and review the safety of our students, staff and visitors at our schools. I have worked closely with Sheriff Jenkins and his staff and the local municipalities’ law enforcement agencies to make sure we are doing all that we can to insure safety.

This year we implemented the Raptor check in process at all of our schools to check backgrounds of visitors. We also are completing plans to finish entry way safety for all over buildings. We have also done training for all staff and working on it for students for when there could be an active assailant in a building. This training hopefully will never be needed, but if it is it will be good that we have done it. The second issue is employee compensation. I have worked hard the last 4 years to get new contracts with our employees that got their compensation back in line with where it should be in comparison to other jurisdictions. We had fallen to the bottom of all school districts throughout the state, we are now back towards the top third which is where we should be based on our county’s wealth.