Carroll Democrats missed this big Board of Education opportunity

Which is a good thing

Did Carroll County Democrats miss an opportunity to hand select someone of their choosing for an appointment to the county’s Board of Education?

The answer would appear to be — Yes — though capitalizing on the opportunity would have required some serious foresight and the clean execution of a grand strategy.

At the center of such a plot would have been Marsha Herbert, an incumbent conservative Board of Ed member currently in the middle of her term, who had hoped to swap her seat on the Board of Ed for one on the Board of Commissioners, thus vacating her Board of Ed seat.

During her time on the Board of Ed, Herbert has voted bravely in favor of policies supporting political neutrality and parental choice, an example of the former being the flag policy which permits only the flying of apolitical flags in schools and infamously disallows pride flags, and the latter being when she voted to keep masks optional for students and teachers.

Predictably, a voting record like that has put her squarely at odds with Carroll’s liberal teachers union — the Carroll County Education Association (CCEA) — which has been hawkish on masking and lockdowns, and in response to the flag policy could be imagined reciting one of those misleading euphemisms like: acceptance isn’t political.

When Herbert announced her run for Commissioner in Carroll’s District 3 as a Republican, entering into a competition with a more than capable fellow Republican Tom Gordon, the CCEA was quick to throw their weight behind Gordon by endorsing his candidacy.

Now separately, consider that entire swathes of Carroll Democrats cloak themselves as Republicans during primary elections to prop up those Republican candidates most willing to lean left. If you can’t get an actual Dem elected, a RINO is the next best thing.

The Carroll Observer reported back in May how Carroll’s liberal Community Action Network openly called for Dems to switch their party affiliation for this reason, a recommendation apparently heeded by progressive Board of Ed candidates Tom Scanlan and Amanda Jozkowski who both recently declared their Republicanism, faux though it obviously is.

But regardless, there on the local political chessboard for play by Dems were two assets:

1. A CCEA endorsement for a candidate of their choosing

2. Those swathes of Dems voting in Republican primaries

As it actually happened, both of those assets were used in service of supporting Gordon.

But really, what they should have done was the complete opposite. The Dems should have had the CCEA endorse Herbert instead of Gordon, and similarly instructed those Ds cloaked as Rs to check her name on the ballot and not his.

Doing so may just have lifted Herbert past Gordon, leaving her Board of Ed seat vacated.

You see, the Board of Ed seats are widely regarded as being the most important in this upcoming general election. Whichever five people end up occupying those posts will hold sway over the issues many feel most passionately about, like the masking and jabbing and indoctrinating of children.

And as it turns out, in a peculiar turn of governmental process flow, any Board of Ed seat vacated after a primary election, which would have been the case had Herbert beat Gordon, is to be filled at the choosing of the incoming Governor, not the incumbent one.   

In other words, the vacated seat would be filled presumably by heavy gubernatorial favorite Wes Moore, not Larry Hogan.

And who knows who the progressive Democrat Moore would have appointed after procuring recommendations from Carroll’s Democratic Central Committee.

Maybe the incumbent Pat Dorsey, to spare her the stress of the general election? Or Amanda Jozkowski, the weakest of the teachers union endorsed slate, in an effort to secure a majority on the Board of Ed on the assumption that Dorsey and Scanlan will get in on their own? Or maybe even Dennis Frazier, the term limited outgoing Commissioner who received $6K from the state’s teachers union PAC to fund his unsuccessful state delegate campaign where he finished 7th out of 8?

Luckily we’ll never have to find out.