We Never Got There

When we asked school board member Ellen Flynn Giles to join us on the podcast we thought we’d spend a large portion of the time talking about her fellow board member Allen Dyer.

That didn’t happen.

In fact, we hardly mentioned Allen at all and that’s probably a good thing. Ellen is serving her second term on the board, which includes a couple of stints as board chair. She is one sharp lady, fluent in six languages. Prior to joining the school board she served on the boards Community Advisory Committee for 16 years as her four children worked their way through the system. Two of her children went on to become teachers in MoCo and one, Alice, is Co-president of HoCo League of Women Voters.

She also has real job as an editor and analyst for energy with McGraw Hill.

Instead of Allen Dyer we talked about how board members spread themselves around the system, no child left behind, race to nowhere, the perfect grade from Sunshine Review, and the search for a new superintendent.

Until yesterday I did not realize that HoCo public system is one of the larger school systems in the country. The average size of a school system in the country is 1,000 students. The HoCo public school system has 50,000 students.

We also discussed elementary school sites in Elkridge. When discussing the Oxford Square location and the perception that it is unsafe for a school to be located near railroad tracks, Ellen mentioned that there has only been one accident on the Camden line in HoCo in the last thirty years and that did not involve children. I wonder if she was referring to Scott Gores unfortunate episode.

Yesterday was also the first time we had an actual audience for the show when four people showed up to listen in.  Okay, that wasn't exactly a huge audience but it was still pretty cool. Dave rigged up a speaker to make it easier for them to follow along.

You can listen to the 45^th episode of “and then there’s that…” here.