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I am pleased the school board will not be moving into the new headquarters. Some of you e-mailed and asked People for Change to tell the legislators to back off — we did not. At some point, someone needed to stop the train. Spending $36 million when the schools and the students have to pay the price is wrong.

And, when the community expressed their concerns, they moved ahead with the deal anyway. What happened to children first? What happened to having a say on the spending of our tax dollars? 

Some may say it cost us $11 million, but how many millions are we spending on waste, misuse and lawsuits against the school system? This school board has made many bad decisions, which in turn has cost us millions in taxpayer dollars. When are we going to say we have had enough bad leadership?

For example, they did not proceed with a full-blown search for the second largest school district in the state of Maryland and the 18th largest in the nation when it came to choosing the next superintendent.

How we can make such a hasty decision on something this important? 

Instead, they rubber-stamped the selection Dr. [William] Hite as the next superintendent without doing a full-blown search. And, we never heard of any other candidates in the running.

They hosted phantom meetings around the county to make it look like they had buy-in on the decision of the new superintendent — all while knowing there were no other candidates but Dr. Hite. We have a $1.7 billion school budget, over 200 schools and 130,000 students. So how many parents actually came out to those meetings? Where is the transparency? Were the numbers posted online?

And, now we have a new superintendent who the school board slipped in, making decisions on our school budget and our tax dollars. Sounds like more waste and misuse all while class sizes are increasing, teachers are not getting the resources they need, and students are not getting the challenging curriculum needed to enter a four-year college. And, yes, we still remain the second worst school system in the state of Maryland.

We really need to wake up. Some of these same school board members plan to run for higher office? What's going to happen to the county then? They will take those same bad habits with them, and the county will be in the same mess it is in now!

Get ready for 2010 and don't let the bad seeds get in!

Mitchellville resident Sandy Pruitt is leader of People for Change.