Board of Education race takes shape as candidates debate Blueprint, laptops and how the board listens

Lines were drawn Wednesday, Oct. 7, when the six candidates for the Carroll County Board of Education met at a candidate forum hosted by the League of Women Voters of Carroll County and the Community Media Center in Westminster. They are competing for three seats on the board, which governs Carroll County Public Schools (CCPS), in the Nov. 3 general election. School board races in Maryland are nonpartisan, and the Carroll seats are on every county voter's ballot. By the end of the night, two slates had made themselves plain.

Marsha B. Herbert, a former school board president, ended her closing statement by asking voters to also choose Cleveland Christopher Friday and Shannon Hinkhaus. All three closed with the same line: "One, two, three."

Lisa Maisano and Julie V. Walsh are running as a pair from opposite parties. Maisano said she is a Democrat and Walsh is a Republican. "We are doing something different by running on a bipartisan slate for a nonpartisan position," Maisano said in her closing statement. Both are endorsed by the Carroll County Education Association and the Carroll Association of School Employees, the unions that represent the school system's teachers and support staff. So is Sharon Wilhide, the sixth candidate, who is not running on either slate. Maisano, Walsh and Wilhide appear on the unions' Apple Ballot of recommended candidates.

Over two hours, the candidates mostly agreed on two things: the school budget has little left to cut, and the current board mishandled its decision to end overnight stays at Outdoor School. They split on the state's Blueprint education law, whether younger students should keep school-issued laptops, and how the board should choose members of its advisory committees.

Candidates are listed in ballot order. Backgrounds are as the candidates described them at the Oct. 7 forum, except where noted as coming from an earlier student forum hosted Sept. 28 by the Carroll County Student Government Association. Hometowns are from their filings with the Maryland State Board of Elections.

Cleveland Christopher Friday of Finksburg said he has spent nearly 29 years in state service. At the student forum, he said he is a warden with the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services in Hagerstown, overseeing a budget of about $175 million. He said he moved to Carroll County for its schools. He has four daughters who attended CCPS, the youngest an 11-year-old who just started middle school. Friday serves on the school board's Family Life Advisory Committee.

Marsha B. Herbert of Westminster, a lifelong county resident, said she was an educator in the county's public schools for more than 40 years. She then served two terms on the Board of Education, from 2016 to 2024, including three years as president and two as vice president. She owns Country Hill Horse Farm and told the student forum she coached a state championship field hockey team. Herbert called herself "the most experienced of everyone here this evening."

Shannon Hinkhaus of Westminster graduated from Westminster High School and earned a business administration degree with a minor in accounting from McDaniel College. At the student forum, she said she worked as a financial analyst at a large Baltimore hospital, where she helped build its budget, and later as a bookkeeper for a private school, reporting to its board. Her three children went through CCPS from kindergarten through graduation. She served on the Family Life Advisory Committee until she stepped down to run for the board.

Lisa Maisano of Sykesville is an engineer by training. She has three children in CCPS: twin seventh graders and a 10th grader. She has been a scout leader for nine years and served three years as an elementary school PTA president. She founded the Carroll Education Coalition, a parent advocacy group, as the school system's Blueprint funding crisis came to a head, starting with meetings over coffee at her kitchen table.

Julie V. Walsh of Mount Airy is the mother of five children, ages 8 to 16, at three CCPS schools. Before staying home with her children, she was a registered lobbyist in Annapolis. At the student forum, she added that she was associate director of a nonprofit lobbying organization and has served as PTO president at two schools. She helped Maisano found the coalition and said the group's advocacy helped save "perhaps 100 educators' jobs."

Sharon Wilhide of Finksburg is a special educator and the parent of two CCPS students. At the student forum, she said she works with deaf and hard-of-hearing students, holds a master’s degree in deaf education from McDaniel College and has worked in the field for 16 years, starting with five years in CCPS as a traveling teacher who worked in nearly every school in the county. She also said she has served as vice president of her children’s school PTA.

The sharpest exchange of the night was over the Blueprint for Maryland's Future, the state education reform law. It requires school systems to phase in higher teacher pay, expanded prekindergarten, more teacher planning time and other changes, with counties paying part of the cost. Several candidates described last year's budget as a crisis driven by Blueprint costs, with educator jobs and programs at risk. Herbert said the county now has a waiver from the law's requirements that runs for two years.

Herbert said she wants the law gone. "Blueprint's not over. We have a waiver, but you all don't realize what is coming down the road," she said. She said she would be meeting with a state government liaison she was introduced to by Del. April Rose, and that she had told the liaison "we need to get rid of it" because it could push the county or the state toward bankruptcy. Herbert also said declining enrollment will hurt the budget, adding, "These five people sitting here beside me have no idea what impact that is going to do."

Hinkhaus called Blueprint "an unfunded mandate." She said its teacher planning time requirement has not taken effect yet and that she doubts there are enough teachers to hire even if the county could afford them. Friday said carrying out the law will cost "a lot of money that honestly I do not believe Carroll County has."

Wilhide opened her closing statement by blaming past boards. "We are where we are today because of the failure of previous board members to properly prepare for Blueprint," she said, calling the waiver "a band-aid." She did not name anyone.

Walsh used the final word of the night to push back. She said the waiver process was created because of the problem in Carroll, and that the state also sent consultants to look at how CCPS was carrying out the law. "There will still be an impact from Blueprint, but it will not be what was suggested before," Walsh said. "It's not like when the band-aid is ripped off, 100 teachers are going to lose their jobs."

Maisano noted that changes to Blueprint are expected to come up in the next session of the Maryland General Assembly.

Hinkhaus and Friday both want to scale back the school system's practice of giving every student a laptop, known as one-to-one devices.

"We gave every child a laptop during COVID, but that was a response to an emergency, not an intentional decision about how students learn best," Hinkhaus said. She wants a "serious discussion" about laptops in grades three through eight. "AI is definitely here to stay," she said, but she is less worried about students using it in their careers than about whether they learn the fundamentals first if laptops replace paper and pencil in the early grades. She said figures discussed during last year's budget season suggested about $1 million could be saved for every three grades taken off the program, though she said textbooks would offset some of that. Friday suggested laptops be eliminated in kindergarten through eighth grade and reserved mainly for high school.

The other candidates did not call for ending the program. Asked how schools should prepare students for artificial intelligence, Walsh and Maisano focused on fundamentals such as critical thinking, writing and attention span. Walsh warned against schools that "chase the shiny new object." Wilhide said CCPS needs an AI policy and better cybersecurity on student devices, saying students can take them home "and get on anything they want." She said the county does not currently have an AI policy. Herbert said CCPS already has guidelines for AI use and is drafting a policy, but is waiting for the state to finish its own first.

The candidates were asked about the process for choosing members of the Family Life Advisory Committee, which advises the board on the health and family life curriculum. Board members appoint its members. As Westminster Wire reported, the board rejected the committee's roster 1-4 on Aug. 12 after members questioned an appointment made without drawing from the applicant pool. It approved a revised roster 4-0 on Sept. 9.

This question did not divide neatly along slate lines.

Hinkhaus said, "I am the one that caused the problems," explaining that she left the committee to run for the board and expected the school system to send out a call for new applicants, which it did not. She defended the board's discretion. "The board chooses people that they believe will represent their views, and the people on the board are elected by the voters," she said, noting that the committee only makes recommendations.

Herbert, her slatemate, took a firmer line. When she was on the board, she said, members chose from the list of applicants and "never ever had that problem because we followed the guidelines." Board members should select names on the list, "not pull them out from the air," she said. Friday, a current committee member, said he applied, was interviewed by someone he did not know, and knew no one on the committee when he joined.

Maisano said the board should have followed precedent and drawn from the most recent pool of applicants, then clarified the written policy. Walsh said she is "kind of uncomfortable" with board members appointing their own advisers. "If you have people chosen by the board who are then providing advice to the board, it just becomes like a circular thing," she said, suggesting geographic representation from across the county instead. Wilhide said members should not simply "recommend their friends" and suggested an interview process.

No candidate defended the current board's decision to end overnight stays at Outdoor School. The program has sent generations of Carroll students to the Hashawha Environmental Center for outdoor lessons that included overnight stays. The board voted 5-0 on June 10 to end the overnight stays, pausing the program this school year before it returns as a redesigned day program for seventh graders in 2027-28. As Westminster Wire reported in August, the safety risk assessment the board commissioned before the vote recommended repairs and procedural fixes, not an end to the overnight program.

Walsh said she read the risk assessment after the vote. "I thought everything in the risk assessment was reasonable and manageable," she said. She said the change "felt like it was snuck in at the last minute." Maisano said she rewrote her public comment the night before the meeting after learning about the vote from a newspaper. She said the agenda listed only "outdoor school" as an action item, with no documents showing the board was considering a change of that size.

Wilhide called the decision "extremely poorly handled" and noted that Hashawha is still used for overnight camps by Girl Scouts and other groups. Hinkhaus, who went to Outdoor School as a student and again as a counselor, said she disliked the process and would have preferred a 30-day comment period or a one-year delay. Friday said he understood some of the board's reasoning but personally disagreed, and hopes overnights can return within a few years.

Herbert and Hinkhaus both said the day program will not save money. "It is definitely going to cost more than the overnight," Herbert said. "And guess what? Just wait. It'll be back on the agenda."

Asked what they would protect and cut if revenue fell short, most candidates said there is little left to cut. "There is nothing left to cut. We have been running so lean for so long," Wilhide said. She said CCPS ranks 24th in the state in per-pupil funding. Walsh said the few programs the board has discretion over are the painful ones, such as high school athletics and elementary band, chorus and orchestra. Maisano said those programs were among the cuts considered last year, and that facilities maintenance has been paid for with one-time money since 2018.

Herbert said her first priority would be protecting employee health insurance, followed by salaries, calling benefits key to keeping teachers. Hinkhaus said she would protect anything directly tied to classroom instruction, such as class sizes, and pointed again to laptops as a place to look for savings. Friday said he could not name specific cuts.

Several candidates said the board's late-afternoon meeting times make it hard for parents, teachers and students to attend. Friday and Wilhide both suggested later start times. Wilhide also called the sign-up process for public comment confusing. Walsh said meetings should be "more meaningfully public" and easier to navigate.

At the student forum, candidates were asked about the state's new limits on student cell phones, and most backed tight rules. Friday said there should be a "bell-to-bell" ban at every level, including between classes and at lunch. Walsh said she does not think the current CCPS policy is "meaningful" and supports a phone-free school day. She said one of her sons started high school with a flip phone and found no one to talk to at lunch because everyone else was on a screen. Hinkhaus and Wilhide also said they support bell-to-bell limits. Herbert said CCPS was "way ahead of the game" on phones before the state acted. Maisano said she wants feedback from students, teachers and administrators before the details are settled.

Early voting runs Thursday, Oct. 22, through Thursday, Oct. 29, from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily. Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 3. The deadline to register in advance is today, Tuesday, Oct. 13. Maryland also allows same-day registration during early voting and on Election Day. Voting locations and mail-in ballot details are on the Carroll County Board of Elections and Maryland State Board of Elections websites.

The full Oct. 7 forum is available on demand at carrollmediacenter.org, on YouTube and on the Community Media Center's cable channels 19 and 1072. The League of Women Voters' voters' guide, with candidate questionnaires, is at vote411.org.

Featured photo: from Community Media Center broadcast.