Parents, MCPS to Discuss New Principal at Neelsville Middle School

Depending on whom you ask, Neelsville Middle School may or may not be getting a new principal at the end of July.

If parents have their way, Dollye McClain who has served as school principal for six years, would remain. But Montgomery County Public Schools officials said McClain did not reapply for her position as mandated by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education policies for schools that fail to meet their Academic Yearly Progress (AYP) goals.

Results released by the Maryland Department of Education in June show that Neelsville Middle School missed the target in eight areas. Although the school had met all its goals in the prior year, it remained under corrective action because schools in this category must meet academic targets two years in a row or improve in all categories by more than 10 percentage points to be safe from staff restructuring.

According to Community Superintendent Darryl Williams, restructuring means that staff at underperforming schools must reapply for their jobs at the beginning of a new school year. These positions will not be automatically restored.

Williams said that McClain chose not to reapply for her job and instead chose another job in the district.

“I think we need to honor Miss McClain’s request to seek a different position,” Williams said. “That is what she wanted — a different position — and that is what we are doing, honoring her request.”

 Art Butler, president of the school’s Parent Teacher Student Association, has two children enrolled at Neelsville. He is organizing parents who want the principal to remain at the school. He said McClain had transformed the school because parents were seeing better discipline and would like for her to stay. He expressed doubt that McLain had decided to seek another position in the school district.

“I will say this, working with Dollye McClain for the last two and a half years, the heart that she put into her job, my opinion is that she is not going to walk away from that job,” said Butler.

A meeting between parents, Community Superintendent Williams and Office of School Performance staff is scheduled for Tuesday evening at the school. Williams said apart from clarifying the restructuring process for parents and students, the meeting will give parents a chance to tell administrators what type of principal they’d want to see at Neelsville. Williams said that while no one has been identified as the next principal, he hoped recommendations to the board of education would be speedily expedited and a new principal would be in place by the end of this month.

Still, Butler said parents are feeling left out because the decision to replace the principal was made without input from parents.

“They tell us that we are stakeholders in the process, but how can we be stakeholders in the process without us getting involved in our choice of principal?” Butler asked. “The parents love Dollye McClain. She is a pillar in our community.”