Washington Post Prince George’s Extra

Thursday, June 28, 2007
Criticism of Schools? ‘Put it on your List’

The Prince George's County Board of Education made it to its summer recess last week, but only after enduring an hour's worth of verbal punishment from a group of parents who gave the school board a "report card" that was anything but straight A's.

Board members listened silently as Sandy Pruitt, the leader of a group called People for Change, explained that "parents feel locked out of the process" of running the schools. She also said the school system's Web site is difficult to navigate and warned that Superintendent John E. Deasy's many new initiatives were taking precedence over long-standing problems with the school system.

Pruitt was joined by her son, Addison Pruitt, an eighth-grader at Ernest Everett Just Middle School, who derided the state of the "filthy" bathrooms at his school and said the cafeteria sometimes ran out of lunches. Other parents testified that their complaints about various issues had been ignored by school board members.

The critical mood, odd for the usually placid board meetings, was picked up by other parents unaffiliated with People for Change: Archie Byrd, a parent of a student at the Thomas Pullen School, vividly described an infestation of rats and roaches there, and David L. Cahn, a frequent speaker at the meetings, decried the board's failure to describe the actions it had taken in closed meetings.

(Of the 24 speakers, not all were negative: Carol Kilby, the outgoing president of the Prince George's County Educators' Association, said she appreciated the board's "balance and thoughtfulness.")

After the storm had passed, the board got to its regularly scheduled business.

"People have a right to express their concerns," R. Owen Johnson Jr., the board's chairman, said after the meeting. "It's critical information. You take it, you put it on your list."

Deasy had this to say about the criticism of the board's responsiveness: "It certainly didn't strike me as the biggest issue of the system by far," he said. "I have not met a board in my career who is more open and more willing to participate with the public than this one is. You never blow [criticism] off, you never dismiss it; you put it into context and you put it among the things you want to make better."