Candidate and current TCPS Board President Emily Jackson BLOCKED me from viewing her campaign Facebook page because I posted ACTUAL, FACTUAL data about her disastrous reign as President of the Talbot County Board of Education, under her desperate posts in The Talbot Spy and on other social media.
Here are the facts as reported:
STATE ASSESSMENT (MCAP)
Math proficiency, 2025–26
Talbot: 20.7% | Maryland: 27.1%
English language arts proficiency, 2025–26
Talbot: 46.8% | Maryland: 51.7%
Change since 2022–23
Math — Talbot: +3.5 pts | Maryland: +3.2 pts
ELA — Talbot: +2.3 pts | Maryland: +5.4 pts
Yet the graduation rate is 97%.
Now she’s attempting to make excuses for failing a generation of Talbot County children.
When you move the goalposts and CHANGE the grading policy to make it appear that grades have improved, that’s NOT teaching children. That’s GAMING the system.
When a student gets 50% on a test simply for signing their name, and a 57% is rounded up to 60%—making it a passing grade—that’s not improving the education of the child. All a student needs to do is get 7% of the test questions correct to receive a passing grade.
How do I know this information?
Because I asked Talbot County Superintendent Dr. Sharon Pepukayi about it at a Moms for Liberty meeting last year. Dr. Pepukayi and her team were the guest speakers and gave a PowerPoint presentation about Talbot County schools. I specifically asked whether the 50% grading rule was true. She confirmed that it was indeed being used in Talbot County Public Schools.
Subsequently, at a Talbot County Board of Education meeting led by President Emily Jackson, along with board member Amy Dodson, they collectively voted to REFUSE to allow a discussion of this horrible policy to be added to the meeting agenda.
Don’t trust me. Go watch the meeting for yourself.
This is a disgrace and another failure of leadership. Our children and grandchildren are suffering as a result.
Talbot County Public Schools has an annual budget of $84.6 MILLION for approximately 4,485 students. That’s approximately $18,863 per student.
Talbot County taxpayers contribute approximately $57 MILLION of that budget, representing about 68% of the school system’s annual funding.
Did you know there are 722 employees in the TCPS system?
Did you know that only 48% of these employees are classroom teachers? That’s approximately 345 actual teachers.
But there are 72 administrators!
This Emily Jackson-run leadership team has FAILED.
Their REIGN OF FAILURE needs to END!
Give them the FAILING GRADE they deserve.
Please vote for Mike Butler, Anne Rosen, and Lisa Hayes for School Board in November.
All three have actually been teachers for many years and will support the TEACHERS and STUDENTS—rather than the teachers’ union and the TOP-HEAVY current administration, which has been propped up by the poor leadership of Emily Jackson and Amy Dodson.
Shari Wilcoxon is the Chair of the Talbot County Republican Central Committee
Are the three candidates you are seeking votes for Members of Moms For Liberty?
No they are not members of Mom’s for Liberty.
Neither is Dr Pepukayi, but she and her team have presented at their meetings multiple times. Do you object to hearing all positions?
This is the pledge they are happy to have signed.
Do you support Parental Rights?
Or would you just prefer failing children?
“I pledge to honor the fundamental rights of parents including, but not limited to the right to direct the education, medical care, and moral upbringing of their children.
I pledge to advance policies that strengthen parental involvement and decision-making, increase transparency, defend against government overreach, and secure parental rights at all levels of government.”
It’s a 7 member board. A majority is needed for any policy issue to prevail.
All elected members take an oath of office to “Protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, uphold the laws of the State of Maryland, ETC”
Why are you requiring an oath in addition to this?
Susan Delean-Botkin, past President Talbot County Board of Education
Thank you Susan for clarifying that there are 7 members so there needs to be at least 4 to implement any policy.
As a longtime resident of Talbot County, I find the information about Emily Jackson and more importantly the classroom statics absolutely appalling. Clearly our taxpayer dollars need to be put to much better use. I have long felt that the teacher/administrator ratio was far too heavily skewed in the wrong direction. We taxpayers(heavily taxed and with so much going to the so-called school system) deserve so much better. BUT what about our students – what do they deserve? These numbers are appalling and the Board of Education should be ashamed.
It’s interesting that there are 7 people on the school board, yet Ms Wilcoxon seems to think that the responsibility for the state of Talbot County Schools lies with just two of the members. Rather than vilify these two members, and rather than complain about the school system, it would be helpful for Ms Wilcoxon to propose some specific ideas about how to improve the system…beyond signing some dubious pledge which is woefully short of specific solutions.
The school board candidates Ms. Wlcoxon endorses don’t love talking about their ties to Moms for Liberty. In the last election, a few admitted the connection, then went quiet when the Star Democrat followed up. Several, if not all, of the Republican candidates for Talbot County Council have signed the Moms for Liberty pledge anyway.
It’s worth knowing a bit about the organization behind that pledge. Moms for Liberty is bankrolled by a small circle of wealthy donors, including one in Florida. Its own co-founder, Bridget Ziegler, spent 2023 at the center of a scandal after her husband, then-Florida GOP chair Christian Ziegler, was accused of rape by a woman the couple had previously been involved with. He denied it and was never charged, but Sarasota’s school board still called on Bridget Ziegler to resign. Ohio Rep. Max Miller has faced his own serious domestic-abuse allegations from his ex-wife, which he denies. And a jury found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll, a verdict that’s since been upheld on appeal and left standing by the Supreme Court. None of this settles anything about any particular local candidate — but it’s reasonable to ask MAGA leadership why they keep making headlines like these. Perhaps Ms. Wilcox can explain.
Even Sarasota, deep in Trump country, wasn’t sold: voters there ousted two Moms for Liberty school board members who wanted to close libraries, defund public schools, and bring Christian nationalism into the classroom. Their idea of “parental rights” mostly meant the right to decide things for everyone else’s kids too.
Ms. Wlcoxon calls this “the other side,” and she’s not wrong. But it’s worth naming what that side actually stands for these days: hostility to public schools and libraries, dislike of democratic norms such as elections, and an obsession to demand loyalty to Mr. Trump. Eastern Shore voters have many better choices.
Opps, spell check did not catch Wilcox rather than Wlcoxon.
Mr. Parson’s makes a great point about responsibility.
Talbot doesn’t need chaos on the School Board like is happening in Somerset County. The candidates Wilcoxon supports would bring that chaos here following their “pledge”.
The Somerset County School Board was taken over by Moms for Liberty.
Quotes from Baltimore Banner articles.
“A MAGA-aligned school board had tried unsuccessfully to fire Tasker-Mitchell over the summer for insubordination, but Maryland education leaders intervened, first reinstating her and then ruling that she had been fired without due process.”
Ten months later, she – a Black woman – left.
“After trying to fire the superintendent, rejecting a new curriculum and seeking to eliminate school librarians, the Somerset County school board has gotten an earful from the public.
It reacted by limiting the way people can interact.
The board shut down public comment, retreating to online meetings “due to the increased violence, vitriol and disruption in the boardroom,“ Somerset County school board Chairman Matthew Lankford said in an email to a parent obtained by The Banner.”
Happening now.
“An Eastern Shore school board wants an 18-and-over rule for young-adult books
Classics like ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘Little Women’ might be off limits to most students under the proposed policy.”
A report from NPR on Moms aka Mary Kay Kay Kays: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/07/1180486760/splc-moms-for-liberty-extremist-group
Running for school board should not be a blood sport. Candidates should not run a gauntlet of ad hominem, personal attacks. How can we keep good people like Emily that way? That is foreign to Talbot.
Shari says that her favored candidates were not endorsed by Moms for Liberty. No, they just signed the Moms for Liberty’s pledge, the same one that Donald Trump signed and urged many others to sign. Moms for Liberty has chapters all over the country and a board of directors, none of whom live on the Eastern Shore. That is an outsider group who interprets what that inscrutable pledge means. Otherwise, why is the pledge so important?
For a country whose wealth and prosperity has been built, in large part, through the development of leading edge technologies and products, the declining overall performance of US students against their peers in other countries should be of major concern to all. These kids will be competing in a global economy and the US is facing increased competition that is better educated and more motivated. This is a crisis that is being made worse by political gamesmanship and failed policy within the education system. We can only hope that there will be constructive debates that allow new candidates to present details of their solutions to these problems and for current administrators and board members to defend their performance and positions.
So, the Talbot County numbers increased? And that’s failure?
Let me be clear, even if they went down, I wouldn’t call that evidence of failure. The thing about standardized tests is that they aren’t measuring what the same group of kids learned or achieved year to year. They measure this year’s class against last year’s class, and if you have kids, you know that some of them learn at different speeds or in different ways than their siblings or their friends. That’s why I hate standardized tests.
But the vagaries of testing aside, the kids in Talbot did better year over year. Would you tell your kids they were failures if they did better today than yesterday? Why say that of an entire school district of kids? Why say that about the teachers that helped them get there?
And while we’re talking about the people who help kids learn, where are you getting 72 administrators? There are 23 school-level administrators like principals and assistant principals. There are 99 total office employees, which includes those people we all know do the rubber-meets-the-road work of getting the kids on the buses and the numbers to the state and the grants filed and the bills paid. Are you counting them as administrators? If so, how does the work get done without them?
Every day, state and federal government put more and more requirements on school districts for things that need to be documented and justified and proven. These unfunded mandates are a big part of increased costs and absolutely a driver of administrative work. No one wants it but it is necessary at every school district.