I updated this piece on October 24.
In an election year, scrutiny of campaign finance reports is nothing new. People want to know who is donating cash and gifts to candidates and why. This year, a small subset of Howard County residents, still upset about last year’s school redistricting process, are convinced that greedy real estate developers are pumping cash into Board of Education campaigns in exchange for influence. The conspiracy theory is that the $650 donated by Howard Hughes is buying the BOE’s assistance in developing every square inch of the county.
I’m going to blow that theory right out of the water with the following statistic: households in the River Hill/Clarksville area have donated roughly $82,000 to BOE candidate campaigns and CAPA’s BOE PAC in the 2020 election cycle.
Holy cow.
To put that number in perspective: the candidates from all five districts in the 2020 Howard County BOE race have collected a total of about $167,000* in contributions from individual donors and CAPA-PAC this cycle. Cross-referencing by address, half of it has come from a single high school catchment area – River Hill High School. In other words, a wealthy area representing about 5% of the population of Howard County is the source of about 50% of the cash in the BOE race.
Bruh.
Let’s look at it from another angle. Of the nine candidates competing in the general election, River Hill money comprises at least half of the total campaign contributions to four of them: Christina Delmont-Small (D1), Larry Pretlow (D2), Sezin Palmer (D4), and Yun Lu (D5). Of those four, three of them are the top earners in this election cycle: Sezin Palmer ($33k), Christina Delmont-Small ($30k), and Yun Lu ($29k). It’s particularly noteworthy that River Hill has heavily subsidized two candidates – Ms. Delmont-Small and Mr. Pretlow – who do not represent their councilmanic districts.
Why?
The motives here aren’t difficult to extrapolate. The 2020 BOE race is essentially a referendum on redistricting, and River Hill has made it clear in the last two redistricting cycles that they paid for River Hill High School, and they intend to keep it, equity be damned. Ms. Delmont-Small, Mr. Pretlow, Ms. Palmer, and Dr. Lu have made their anti-redistricting positions clear, and River Hill is putting its considerable financial weight behind them.
The rest of us are left to grapple with the bitter truth about the self-perpetuating cycle of inequity in public education: that money makes the world go ’round.
*This number excludes self/spouse contributions.