Should Good Schools Be Dismantled? The Campaign to Destroy an Excellent School in the Name of Equity

Normally, a lavish-spending school district would not be in the business of closing schools, but the leftist-dominated School Board of Montgomery County, Maryland had other ideas.

In a 7-1 vote conducted on March 26^th, that Board voted to close one of the top nationally-ranked high schools in the nation, known for attracting high-performing kids, in favor of merging them into a larger high school campus with less of a specialized academic focus. They passed this despite the largest budget MCPS has ever been gifted by taxpayers at over $3.6 billion.

Thomas S. Wootton High School has historically been one of the top public high schools in the country, ranking as high as #34 in the 2008 U.S. News and World Report . (It has since declined to 191^st, although it is still excellent.) The school is also predominantly White and Asian, with about equal representation of both races .

Progressives on the MCPS Board have had dismantling this excellent public school in their crosshairs for years now, as they deem its racial demographics "too white" and "too Asian."

Excellence Targeted for Destruction

The progressive school board started their crusade against Wootton years ago, first by dismantling Wootton's old administration. In 2024, the N-word was found under a student's desk at Thomas S. Wootton High School. MCPS district leadership blamed the former principal Douglas Nelson, implying that a delay in reporting the behavior was "further evidence of the need for significant cultural and behavioral change." The board forced him out. MCPS swiftly moved to appoint a new interim principal, Joseph Bostic, and two years later, with Bostic providing no resistance, the Board decided to close down the school.

The lone dissenting vote for the closure was from Julie Yang, which provoked MCPS Board member Rita Montoya to shout "racist!" at Yang. Montoya later asserted, "A vote against this model is a vote against perpetuating the racist access to these programs that has been going on for quite some time." This of course, was a response to the findings that Wootton was disproportionately white and Asian.

Racist? While blaming parents for choosing to send their kids to Wootton, Montoya shields the real reason why the Board wanted to close Thomas S. Wootton school in the first place.  Because of its national reputation as an excellent school, and thus its ability to captivate education-seeking parents into the community, Thomas S. Wootton High School engenders progressive resentment. Its teachers are top of the line because they know that they are respected and valued by its community. Its very specialness has provoked the district's leadership, who have been plotting ways to lower its influence or "redistribute" its gains to other schools.

The planned Crown High School, a behemoth of a school scheduled to open in 2027 that would completely swallow up all regional distinctions in the community, represented that opportunity.

Instead of allowing Thomas S. Wootton to stay functioning, the Board chose to displace Wootton kids to the Crown school. In doing so the Board voted to remove walking distance access and portability for thousands of families in that area. Instead of phasing out the school gently and respectfully, the Board gave a maximum 2-year process for students and parents to get out.

Removing Opportunity, Deleting Choice

The Board is hell-bent on taking away opportunities for parents to choose their own education for kids with their feet, instead agglomerating everything into one massive school for DEI purposes.

This kind of practice is sadly rampant in progressive districts. Facing an activist-led push from Chicano activists, in 1991 the LA Unified School District purchased the land to eventually build a massive, $565 million Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools behemoth school to centralize their vise grip over the community. This comes at the expense of allowing residential and neighborhood distinctiveness, which includes many different Latino ethnicities as well as a substantial Korean population. Today, the RFK school suffers from massive educational shortages, chronic absenteeism and struggles with enrollment due in large part to lack of buy-in from its local community.

The progressive obsession with equity—keeping all schools populated with the same racial demographics—often wields itself as a buzzsaw that ultimately kills the glory of education.

The Montgomery County parent community that I interviewed shared with me that "schools do not become good because of their geographic location; rather, it is their residents, through their sustained investment in education over the long term, who forge these high-quality schools."

The parent community is right. Progressives cannot simply tear down something that was great because of decades of sustained parental investment and hope to redistribute its gains to the rest of the county.  

For example, MCPS intends to force Thomas S. Wootton's teachers—which are excellent ad have developed longstanding relationships with their community—to teach at Crown High School to a population they are not used to teaching. Surely if these teachers refuse they will be called "racist."

MCPS's decision might prove shortsighted. Amidst enrollment declines, MCPS received more funding per student than ever. Perhaps an outrage—and later exodus—of parents from this taxpaying, public-minded community will force Maryland's Democratic government to rethink its strategy of dismantling strong communities.

The former glory of this public-school educational community is threatened by a progressive push to coat everything with the sheen of sameness. "Equity" is resurgent in blue education states, with high performing kids and the parents who raise them treated as statistical boosts for the counties that house them while increasingly losing their voices in the education system.

When our beacons of hope are snuffed out, all that's left is darkness.

MORE COVERAGE OF WOKEISM IN SCHOOL

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