Over two years ago, Montgomery County Public Schools was in the center of a scandal. An investigation found school leaders tampered with an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment and workplace bullying. Some district parents and employees called for new leadership.
Now, district leaders say they are still working to clean up long-standing problems in Maryland’s largest school system. And some leaders say that it is taking time away from the district’s core mission — academic progress.
“The reality is that MCPS has a fiscal management and accountability problem,” said Schools Superintendent Thomas Taylor, who joined the district in 2024. “Those have really bubbled to the top, and in a lot of ways, have surpassed some of the academic challenges that need to be addressed as well.”
The district did not give an estimate on how much has been spent toward all of the fixes, which also involved hiring law firms that conducted several third-party investigations.
The Montgomery school system has been under increased scrutiny by the county government and other groups in recent years. In 2023, an investigation in The Washington Post revealed that administrators improperly handled several reports of alleged misconduct by a middle school principal. The school board asked Monifa B. McKnight, the superintendent at the time, to resign.
The school board then hired Taylor, an alumnus of the Montgomery district, whose most recent superintendent stint was in Stafford County, Virginia, in 2024. They charged Taylor with restoring trust and creating a culture of accountability in the school system.
When he joined the district, he restructured the central office and completely opened up his senior management team — making some employees reapply for their jobs. He said that he is usually against reorganizations but that he felt “there was a real need” because of some of the problems he observed.
Many of the problems have been documented by the Montgomery County inspector general’s office. In August, a review found that about 12,000 of the school system’s estimated 30,000 full-time and part-time employees had outdated criminal history checks. Separately, 4,900 school employees had not undergone a required Child Protective Services check.
The school system estimated it would cost about $2 million to conduct the overdue background checks. Administrators started clearing the backlog at the beginning of the school year, and the district finished fingerprinting and conducting CPS checks for its school-based employees in December. But it has yet to finish checks for central office employees.
Another inspector general review, released in November, found that some of the school system’s procurement practices were not complying with state law. Some purchases exceeding $25,000 were not properly approved by the school board, the report said, and some employees were also hired as suppliers.
Taylor said in a statement at the time that he was “frustrated to continue to discover operational challenges … that should have been corrected long ago.”
In an interview in December, Taylor said a third-party investigation into the background check backlog found some wrongdoing and neglect, and that some individuals no longer work with the district. He stopped short of naming any employees, citing that it was a personnel issue, but said it was “both good and a little frustrating from an accountability standpoint.”
He also added that after he was hired, he learned the school system was in a sore need of allocating more money toward funding its employee benefits plan, and estimated that fix would cost roughly $160 million over several fiscal years.
“Other enhancements, like high-dosage tutoring, really come at the expense of having to backfill for other financial issues that really have arisen through bad financial management,” Taylor said. “And it embarrasses me to say it, because I feel like MCPS for generations had a reputation of being good financial managers, and that we’ve eroded the public trust is tremendously frustrating.”
Taylor broadly listed off some of the other lingering issues the school system has had to spend money on. Among them: defending the district in a case before the Supreme Court on parental opt-outs, managing its heavily scrutinized fleet of electric buses and crumbling school facilities. In a recent budget presentation, Taylor dubbed the problems “our ghosts from the past.”
“When you’re spending all your time focusing on infrastructure and payroll issues … it’s keeping the laser focus away from instruction,” said David Stein, president of the county’s teachers union.
Mickie Chandra, a parent of two Montgomery students, said some parents have criticized Taylor for repeatedly stating that he’s trying to clean up past issues and question whether he is shifting blame on former leaders. Chandra said that as a parent advocate, she has been able to get a “bird’s-eye view” of a litany of systemic problems. She compared the school system to being “a ship in infested waters.”
“I think it’s unfair to have expectation that he’s going to come up, and voilà, everything is so much better,” Chandra said. “It will take time, and that’s because culture is really hard to change.”
Grace Rivera-Oven, the Montgomery school board president, said some of her work so far has been focused on making adjustments to the human resources department and its practices. Investigations in 2024 found, among other problems, that the school system lacked a centralized, searchable database of complaints that could help identify repeat offenders. She also said the system was often “kicking the can down the road” when it came to maintaining its buildings.
“I don’t think we were catching up with the times,” said Rivera-Oven, who was elected to the school board in 2022 and represents District 1. “We were still kind of stuck 20 years ago, and things changed quite a bit in the system.”
Taylor said that the problems have been “a huge distraction” to focusing on some of the district’s top issues, such as the performance gaps for students of color compared to their White peers along with the disproportionately low literacy and math rates for students with special needs. But, he continued, the school system needs to “walk and chew gum at the same time.”
“We have to be able to do the financial management, accountability and transparency work, and the academic work,” he said.
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