Notes from public comments by Jerry Alexandratos at Frederick County budget meeting on 20 March 2024. No prior text was written, so these words are paraphrased, not verbatim.
Good evening, I’m Dr. Jerry Alexandratos. … I don’t have prepared remarks because I didn’t know if I could make it to this meeting, but as I sat through the meeting… first of all, I want to say that I support fully funding Frederick County Public Schools. My wife is a retired school teacher and there hasn’t been a year we have been together that she hasn’t contributed out of her own pocket for her classroom. And that’s a shame, and that’s a problem, and I feel that teachers and the Superintendent of Schools should be up here begging for full funding of the school system. I feel that Support Staff should not be underpaid. And I definitely feel that we should not be talking about crumbling public school buildings. That reflects a systemic failure, and a lack of long term planning. Okay? I recognize that you were not here twenty [or] thirty years ago when some of these buildings were built. As a former homewoners association board member, what we would do is called a Capital Reserve Study, where as soon as something was built, we would start planning for the lifetime: for the depreciation, for the long term repairs and replacement. And the fact that we have crumbling school buildings where students are still going to school reflects that we are not doing that kind of long term planning. Now, you can’t fix something that didn’t happen twenty or thirty years ago, but you can fix something going forward and implement a better planning process, so that when you put in a new school, you start thinking about the lifetime of that school, the maintenance, and the replacement. And you take a look at trends of growth and you plan for that, because half the people talking this evening regarding the growth of the school system were talking about it as if people didn’t know it was coming and we should have. And that kind of planning should be not just done ad hoc, but implemented as a part of law, including keeping class sizes to a reasonable level, and not over-burdening teachers and staff. Thank you very much.
Link to YouTube video of meeting: