Marilyn Crosby of Lexington Park is seeking her second term in the At-Large St. Mary’s County Board of Education race in the April 3 primary. She has two challengers, Trisha Post and James Tomasic. The top two vote getters will face each other in the November general election. Crosby is a retired teacher with 24 years of experience and a Master’s Degree in Special Education. She was nominated for the Agnes Meyer Teaching Award. She was School Improvement Team secretary for 10 years and was a member of the Budget Advisory Committee before her election to the school board in 2008. She has been a resident of St. Mary’s County since 1970. She has been married to Tom Crosby for 40 years. Their children attended Town Creek Elementary School, Esperanza Middle School and Great Mills High School. She has two grandchildren attending St. Mary’s public schools and a third grandchild will start kindergarten in 2016. Each of her children has a college degree and she said they are grateful for the education they received in St. Mary’s County. Crosby says she was responsible for bringing the county and school system’s financial officers together to work towards a more accurate school board budget document. “I don’t need the credit but I think I got them more coordinated.” The following is an interview by Reporter Dick Myers at the Bay Net office and has been edited due to space considerations
Marilyn Crosby: We need to provide pathways to success for all children and we already have them, we need to continue working with them. Fairlead Academy is one of them.
The Bay Net (TBN): What do we need to do in the future to achieve the pathways to success?
Crosby: We right now have several pathways. We have the tech center. I worked strong getting funding in there for almost four years now. Now with this construction management in building the house you have to know more than one thing. One of the things you are going to have is plumbing. I think that’s great because we need to provide students with occupations that they can get a job with. I don’t believe everybody should necessarily go to college. We are out of skilled labor in this country. They make many times six-figure salaries. Here is a big problem we have. This is why I am on the board. Right here (points to a paper) are all the class sizes in St. Mary’s County. When I first got on the board it took me three years to get this. I got them and this time when I asked for them I hot them right away. So we are more transparent than we were. We got rid of 43 classroom teachers last year. That’s a lot of teachers and our enrollment keeps increasing. That means class sizes are going up. This budget year coming, and I counted them myself, we only put back 23. That means we are 20 short. There are 750 children in Evergreen. That school is as big as a middle school. They are as big, only seven under, what Esperanza is and they only have one vice principal and Esperanza has three. It’s not for lack of problems. There are lots of them and I need to work on para-educators again. I need to keep the para-educators. I have heard that some para-educators have been turned into teachers.
