‘This is our year.’ Are You Sure?
If there’s one thing that MCPS knows how to do, it’s make a back-to-school video. Students put on incredible performances and the video has the energy of a school district that has nothing to worry about. It is infinitely more entertaining than Superintendent Dr. Thomas Taylor standing behind a podium telling students to “make it a great year.” There is just one tiny problem: the video is called “This Is Our Year.” Considering what students are actually walking into this fall, that title seems rather daunting. If this really is our year, MCPS has a lot to prove.
The timing of the video is what makes it so difficult to watch without a little skepticism. MCPS is beginning the 2026-2027 school year with a roughly $3.7 billion operating budget and a plan that affects 415 positions. The district has emphasized that 159 of those positions were vacant and unfilled, while the final budget came in $36 million below MCPS’s original request.
I appreciate the commitment to the bit, as I do not believe that the music video should have been replaced with a budget hearing. Nobody wants to spend the first week of school watching a three-minute explanation of MCPS’s finances. But there is something strange about watching students dance through picture-perfect hallways knowing that the district has spent months figuring out what it can afford to cut. It would be a little easier to believe that this is our year if MCPS weren’t kicking it off by telling schools to do more with less.
The budget would be enough to make the video feel disconnected, but the issue of safety casts a dreadful shadow over it all. One of the most interesting details about this video is that Blake High School’s band is featured in it. I immediately wondered if this was intentional. As one can imagine, the April shooting at the school was an unforgettable experience for the local community, so seeing Blake students featured so prominently in a video about starting over made me wonder if MCPS was trying to send a message. Maybe it’s that Blake’s community has moved forward, or maybe it’s that they’re just the best band in the county. Assuming that it’s the former, I have a question: If this is Blake’s comeback story, where is Wootton’s? The school faced its own shooting in February and it fundamentally changed our own community
Yet when MCPS created a video about coming back together, it’s Blake’s band we see. Their participation did make the video more meaningful than it would have been without them, but it raises questions about what MCPS considers a successful recovery. Is it putting students on camera and showing that everyone is smiling again? Or does it mean addressing the reasons that facilities were unsafe in the first place?
Those questions become particularly important because MCPS’s own reviews of the two incidents identified areas for improvement. The after action review for Wootton High school identified communication, protocol consistency and reunification as inadequate, while the Blake after-action report recommended improvements to emergency communication, earlier activation of the district’s incident command system, expanded camera coverage and upgrades to public-address and radio systems. However, this could be difficult to implement due to the smaller operating budget.
It should be noted that a student smiling in a music video does not mean a community has forgotten what happened, and returning to school does not automatically mean students feel safe there. If MCPS wants to celebrate Blake's resilience, it should also be prepared to explain what it has learned from it—and Wootton for that matter.
Instead of explaining what they are doing differently this year, the camera cuts back to dancing. Who can blame them? Dancing is a lot easier than taking accountability.
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