Five Hawkins Gate Road parents stood at the lectern last Tuesday in a final effort to convince the Charles County Board of Education (BoE) that including Hawkins Gate Road in the new Neal Elementary district was illogical and unreasonable.
Hawkins Gate resident Gail Jacobs expressed her disillusionment with the BoE. She called attention to the paltry number of her neighbors at the meeting as an indication of their feelings that the board doesn’t care about these children. She explained “[the board’s] decisions have disillusioned many [Hawkins Gate] parents.”
Lynwood Jacobs calmly expressed to the board members, “I don’t think public involvement was taken seriously [by the BoE]. I was told that there would be no exceptions [allowing non-Matula-zoned children] to attend the Matula school; but there are ninety current students attending Matula that live outside the current boundary. Moving that population should have been considered first before moving La Plata children.”
Mike Lucas pointedly told the BoE that he wouldn’t present any additional facts at the time because all the facts people presented previously seem to have been ignored by most of the members. “As I’ve spoken with board members, no one’s told me that my opinions or facts are wrong, but the Board of Education doesn’t want to set a precedent [of granting requests].”
Kim Lucas, in an eloquent and impassioned appeal, described the board’s behavior towards Hawkins Gate families as that of an authoritarian parent toward a petulant child. “There is no valid reason for making our one street move [school districts]. [Neal Elementary] is not closer, its teachers are no better, it’s not faster to get there, and it won’t contain more children who’ll go on to middle school with [the Hawkins Gate children].” Mrs. Lucas felt the board expected “Because I said so,” to be sufficient reason in this matter.
That BoE meeting stretched into its third hour before redistricting finally came up for its vote. The families who had spoken during the public forum at the start of the meeting had waited throughout the meeting with several of their neighbors for the board’s decision on this matter. An hour earlier, the board had altered the order of its agenda and moved up its vote on the newly negotiated teachers’ contract in order to accommodate the teachers’ union representatives’ who left the meeting immediately afterward.
Despite the presence of several young Hawkins Gate children, who waited with their parents for the redistricting decision, the board did not move this vote to an earlier place in the agenda so those children could get home and into bed at a reasonable school-night hour.
Continued below map.
Board member Jennifer Abell used her moment of pre-vote discussion time to help her colleagues see that voting for the Hawkins Gate families’ request needn’t set a precedent if the board remembers to simply consider all future redistricting cases on their merits alone. She felt strongly that the BoE shouldn’t be a ‘”coo