In Part 1 of this series we suggested that County Executive candidate Evan Glass bolster his demands for transparency by disclosing those MCPS union members and administrators involved in the Beidelman cover-up. In this post we look at Mr. Glass’s voting record on the MCPS budget.
Mr. Glass made an emphatic case for transparency in his piece in Bethesda Magazine Reforming our school budgets. That piece appeared on May 11, 2023, and he mentioned it in a Facebook post on August 25, 2025. During that time, the MCPS operating budget ballooned by 15% and the capital budget by 19%—and Mr. Glass voted for these increases each time.
If he voted for those budgets, then presumably his transparency requirements have been satisfied. Apparently he still is unsatisfied about MCPS’s transparency, yet voted for its budgets anyway. Something isn’t adding up.
Finding transparency in a combined budget over $8.1 billion is like reading the never-ending novels Les Misérables by Hugo or War and Peace by Tolstoy. Here and there we get tidbits of resolve and resolution, but after 800 pages we are left with humanity’s underlying problems. Similarly, if we add on layers and layers of oversight, forensics, and investigators, we are still left with a $8.1 billion budget whose number one priority is to pay salaries to administrators and union officials, and whose number 10 priority is students. Nobody is incentivized to make the school system transparent or efficient.
The only way to force financial transparency onto Maryland’s largest “school system” (not much of either) is to incentivize it—and that means school vouchers. With vouchers, parents send their children to the school that best fits their outlook and their pocketbook. Once MCPS realizes it is bleeding students, it will think twice about hiring consultants, engaging in stupid litigation, slathering on layer after layer of useless bureaucrats, and retaining failing teachers. (Trust me, the successful teachers know who the failing teachers are.) Instead of rewarding MCPS with year-over-year of budget largesse, Mr. Glass can demonstrate great sincerity in his transparency demands by offering school vouchers.
