In July 2022, Cynthia McCabe became the first woman to take on the job of superintendent of Carroll County Public Schools, and began a four-year contract with the county at a salary of $235,000.
McCabe leads the county school system, which includes more than 25,000 students, and works with the Board of Education to oversee an operating budget of $442.6 million for fiscal 2024.
Prior to being selected as superintendent, McCabe worked as CCPS Chief of Schools for three years. In that role she supported principals and directors of elementary, middle and high schools and also supervised student services and technology services departments.
A Baltimore County native, McCabe earned a bachelor of science in elementary education from Towson University in 1994 and a masters in education in policy, planning and administration from the University of Maryland College Park, in 1999. She has worked in the Carroll County school system since 2001, holding positions as principal, elementary supervisor, and Director of Elementary Schools.
McCabe’s first year as superintendent coincided with the rollout of the first year of the state’s Blueprint for Maryland’s Future legislation. The Maryland Accountability and Implementation Board approved late last month Carroll’s 159-page plan to comply with mandates set by the 2021 law.
The Carroll County Times asked McCabe how things are going entering her second year on the job, and what changes families can expect in the upcoming school year, which begins Sept. 5.
Will students and families notice differences in schools and classrooms this school year?
Yes. For this school year, we have added $11 million of support to schools that have more of our students who are struggling, mainly with poverty or with English being their second language. Or, with students who receive special education services. So, the schools who have more students supported by those areas are are going to see more staff. They may see more administrators, they may see more mental health providers, more teachers, more mentor teachers so that the teachers in our classrooms are being mentored and guided appropriately, especially our newer teachers. So those are the those are the things that people will see that will be different this year. Again, not every school will see that.
Many, but not all, of those schools are in the northwestern part of the county?
Yes. More broadly speaking, yes, that’s how I would characterize them.
What is the staffing situation like ahead of the new school year? How does CCPS ensure that all positions are filled?
We have been reaching out in different ways to the community at large letting them know what kinds of positions we have open this year. We’ve had a lot of teaching positions open because many of our teachers — we’ve actually hired them for our compensatory (education) positions that have been added with that $11 million. So, it opened up a lot of teaching positions and gave a lot of new teachers the ability to get a teaching position here. We still have some of those positions open.
We also have lots of other available positions, like in our instructional assistant pool. We also need custodial workers as well as bus drivers. Because of the additional positions that we’ve received, it’s given us more openings in our teaching population.
But also, Maryland colleges just aren’t producing as many teachers as we need across the state to fill all of the open teaching positions, so we continue to go to campuses to recruit at the college campuses. Our human resource department has been holding job fairs here in the community, as well as using different modalities to advertise our open positions.
Does this mean there is more leniency in filling teaching positions? Would CCPS employ a teacher who may have a relevant background outside of education, for example?
Yes, we are. We are hiring more provisional teachers today than we have in the past. So, we may hire someone who is not completely finished their certification in teaching, but who has a degree and a background in the content that they’ll be responsible for teaching.
So yes, we’ve we’ve gotten much more creative, and I think as a state we need to keep being creative with how we encourage young people to go into education. Some of that might mean being able to pay for students’ college education, if they agree to teach for so many years after they gain a position. Creative solutions like that I think will be needed in order to help fill the the open positions that we have and will continue to have across the state.
How would you characterize the career move you mentioned, where teachers were hired to fill positions that support compensatory education students?
It would be the same pay structure and it would be considered a lateral move. You would still be considered a teacher, but your primary job responsibility would be in helping and enhancing what’s going on in someone else’s classroom rather than your own.
How have you responded to the ongoing effort to remove books from school media centers?
We’ve heard from our community on on both sides of this issue, regarding supplemental materials. The books in our media centers are considered supplemental materials, and what we’re looking at right now is using our current process, which is a reconsideration process. What that means is — historically and currently today — any parent who has a concern about a material in our media centers can bring that to our attention.
We have a standing reconsideration committee made up of administrators, teachers and students, to look at that material and determine whether or not it it meets our guidelines for selection. Once the reconsideration committee meets, reads the book, and determines whether or not it meets our criteria, then then a letter is written to the parent who spurred the reconsideration request. Then, at that point, the book either remains in the media center or is pulled from the media center.
Will the policy for book removal or book inclusion be reconsidered anytime soon?
That would be that would be the decision of the Board of Education. My sense is that the way we currently handle our materials, it’s working for us, so unless the Board of Education determines that we really need to look at a revision, I think our current policy will hold.
Which, if any, CCPS policies need to be updated?
Right now we’re taking a look at our fundraising policy, and what we try to do is look at our policies on an ongoing basis. We don’t like it when our policies aren’t at least looked at every three to five years. It doesn’t mean that we always make revisions, but we try to take a look at what we have, and we’ve had situations that have arisen that have made us go back and look at that policy and perhaps see a need to change. But, I would say right now the one we’re taking a look at is is for fundraising in particular.
What role does the Career and Tech Center play in the education system and how would you like to see it change or develop?
I’m very proud of our Career and Tech Center. It is so popular with our students. We always have more students who want to get into our programs there than we have room for, so I think it provides a type of hands-on education that many of our students want. It prepares them for for a career, for some of them, directly when they graduate from high school. We offer programs there and certifications there so that when our students graduate, they can they can get a job that will pay them a good wage.
We also have students who want to participate in the Career and Tech Center, and they plan on going to college as well. So, it may be that they want to get a jumpstart on studying the content that they are selecting for college. That’s what we hear from most of our students. Or, it could be something that they just have an interest in and want to pursue while they’re in high school.
The bottom line is, our Career and Tech Center is so popular that I would love to see us be able to increase the number of seats that we have in each of our programs. But that takes funding, so we will keep looking at that and determining if we have an ability to to increase the programs for our students.
How have recent construction and instructional technology purchases changed what the Career and Technology Center has to offer?
Because we were able to put the addition on to the current Career and Tech Center, we were able to set our current programs to standard as far as square feet that it entails and state-of-the-art equipment that is needed for each of the programs there. So, unfortunately, even though we put a large addition onto the career in tech center, it did not allow us to add seats to any of our programs or to add additional programs. What all of that did was allow us to get up to spec on where we should have been with our career and technology programs.
It’s important for our community to know that now each of our programs is up to specification and has all of the latest equipment and technology that we can have to support our students, but we don’t have more space for more students or more programs. If we were to to move in that direction, we would need to have more space and more teachers.
What role does Carroll Community College play in career and technology education, especially now that high school students may take unlimited community college classes for free?
It really does open up new opportunities. There are programs at the community college that that we can’t offer here, and we also offer some of our career and technology spaces to the community college for their community college students to take advantage of at night or in the evening for evening college courses.
With our collaboration with the community college, our students really get the best of both worlds. They can take courses at the community college through dual enrollment and the community college can also use our spaces as they need to for their college students.
How is CCPS currently planning on tackling the fiscal 2025 budget? How will fiscal 2025 be different from fiscal 2024 and other years?
That’s a great question. For fiscal 25 we have a big challenge. We have $80 million in compensatory education that needs to be spent on the targeted schools that we talked about earlier, and that’s not $80 million in new money that’s coming from the state. For instance, the $11 million that we are spending this year on those extra positions in some of our schools — that was all new money from the state, but the $80 million that in FY 25 will need to be spent on targeted schools has to come from our current budget. That’s why I keep reiterating to people that we will see big changes in our schools because we will end up having to take resources from certain schools to give to other schools, in order to show that we have reallocated $80 million of our current budget and put that into those targeted schools.
How are you planning to accomplish that?
We really don’t have any choice but to move resources around. We in Carroll County we don’t have a large central office and we don’t have large programs that are staffed with many people. In other systems, what they’re able to do is take programming from other areas and put it into compensatory education, but since we have cut 320 positions over the last 10 years, we don’t have any positions to reallocate to the targeted schools, and that’s why we will end up having to move staff from certain schools to targeted schools. That’s really our only real solution since at least 85% of our budget is on people — it’s on staffing. So that’s what we have to move, and we have to move it from one place to another.
What sorts of challenges and opportunities are being created by growing enrollment?
We are growing in enrollment, which is a great thing. We love to see our school system grow. We love to get new students into our system. It can create challenges for us when many of the students coming into the system are being distributed to the same school.
For instance, we’ve seen a lot of growth in Sykesville-Eldersburg area in the past few years, and because of that growth, the Board of Education has approved the plan to add additions to Freedom Elementary School and Sykesville Middle School. With those additions, we hope to be able to house our students more safely and comfortably within their districted location.
Is there an added significance to being the superintendent tasked with overseeing the implementation of Blueprint in Carroll County?
I do think this is a challenge unlike anything that any of the superintendents previously have had to deal with. Luckily, I have a great staff here to work with and to problem solve with and I also am able to problem solve with the superintendents in the other 23 districts across the state. All the superintendents realize that we are in a very unique position, and while I think we all support Blueprint and support the goals that Blueprint is trying to achieve, we are all facing some of the same challenges, as well as different challenges, with implementing Blueprint.
How well do you and the school board work together?
I think I’m lucky enough to be a superintendent in the school system in which I worked. I’ve worked here for 22 years, seven years in Howard County, but 22 years here. In that time, I’ve had the opportunity to build relationships with with parents, with community members and with board members. So I have a very good working relationship with our current board, and I really value that relationship, because in a time of challenge — like we find ourselves in now — it’s so important to have trust and respect for for the folks on the board and for myself and have that that genuine ability to be able to work together to address problems.
How do you feel the first year of being superintendent has gone?
I think it’s gone well. We have been able to get back into focusing on instruction, which is what we’re here for. We’ve gotten a chance to focus on making sure that our first pass instruction is the highest level it can be … school systems have a lot of remediation, intervention and acceleration for students in small groups, but it’s the whole group first pass of the instructional content that that we believe is the most important. So, we’ve been able to allow classroom teachers to really take their time and focus on on honing those skills so that more students understand the content the first time it’s presented, rather than focusing on reviews and remediation.
Will anything change for you in the second year in this position?
No. I have found that being open, honest and transparent has really, I think, helped to build trust between myself and the community and myself and staff. And so I don’t plan on on changing that. I want to continue to share challenges and share how we’re approaching those challenges and hear input from the community and from staff.
What policies, programs, and/or events that engage the community have you introduced or supported this past year that you are most proud of?
With the implementation of Blueprint comes many challenges for our school system, so we really need our community’s awareness of how the Blueprint will affect the school system and ultimately affect their children, but we also need to also need to create an awareness so that parents understand what to expect. Once we as a school system understood that in order to implement Blueprint we would need to move certain resources from some schools to other schools, we knew we had to get that word out and get that word out quickly so that no one in the community, and no parent, is taken off-guard when that happens.
The way that the way that I chose to do that last year was to host town hall meetings so that the community could receive a presentation with lots of information about Blueprint and how it would affect us, then allow the community a time for asking questions and having us answer those important questions.
I think that this year I will continue to reach out to the community in different ways: through emails, through meetings in the community similar to the town halls, as well as any other way that I can come up with that will inform parents. As we get [closer to] the 2025 school year, we will be seeing more and more changes at the school level due to Blueprint implementation. This is going to affect both staff and students, so it’s very important to me that — again — everyone be informed as quickly as possible what will happen and why it’s happening.
What sorts of policies, programs, and/or events have you introduced into a classroom setting or supported this past year that you are most proud of?
In education, sometimes we can be guilty of being attracted to the next shiny object and believing that that next program is going to be what unlocks the key to learning for students, but what we know is that it’s the teacher in front of the students and that first-pass instruction that is really the key to our students learning, and learning on grade level standards. So I’m proud of the fact that we’re trying to decrease the number of new programs that our teachers have to learn and allow them to focus.
One thing that we are moving forward with is our Schoology implementation. During the pandemic, our teachers learned very quickly to how to teach virtually because everyone had to, but now we are very purposefully learning how to have an online classroom as well as teach students in person. With Schoology, our teachers are able to have an online presence with the students that they’re teaching in person. Many resources can be can be placed on Schoology. Students can turn in work via Schoology, ask questions, so this virtual platform does not replace in-person teaching — it augments in-person teaching. Our secondary folks have been learning Schoology and implementing it last year … and for this upcoming school year, our elementary teachers will be implementing Schoology as well.
Why was Schoology chosen? What sets it apart from other online learning models?
It’s a learning platform, and our instructional technology team analyzed many of the available learning platforms. (They) really believed that Schoology was the one that offered the most benefit to our students at this time, and to our teachers. We’ve been working on how to help teachers understand the benefits of having that online presence with their students while they are teaching in person, so I think that is going to just grow from year to year, so that our students have the best of both worlds, really.
Is there an added significance to being the first female superintendent of CCPS?
It’s an honor to be the first female superintendent and I think that for some of our staff, that might give them a way to see themselves moving forward as a superintendent themselves. But, I would like to think that I was the best person for the job, regardless of whether I was male or female, and I always like to say that the challenges of the job are the same whether you’re a male or a female. So, while I’m honored, I would rather not play up being a woman versus a man in the job because, like I said, I hope I’m the best person for the job regardless of gender. And the challenges are all the same.
Do you have a favorite and a least favorite part of this job?
I’d say my favorite part is being able to go out to schools and talk with administrators, teachers and students and see students working in the classrooms.
I would say, while I love all of the job, my least favorite part is sometimes feeling like I can get confined to central office here, and the administrative issues that that we have to deal with. Sometimes I don’t get to go out to schools as much as I would like to, just because I have to deal with more administrative or operational issues.
Last year I was able to go out to schools pretty often and talk with everyone, and I do have a schedule that my assistant puts on my calendar at the very beginning of the year, so that I make sure that I’m going out to all the schools regularly and that they’re seeing me regularly. But I still don’t get to go out as often as I would like to.
