Baltimore City Public Schools

I'm Principal Ryan Stokland.

I am the proud principal of the Katherine Johnson Global Academy in Baltimore City Public Schools.

This is now going into year two for me.

I started my journey in education in Philadelphia, coming into the teaching role at Mastery Charter School.

I'm going to become Baltimore City, a big Baltimore City advocate.

and a big stakeholder in Baltimore City and a Baltimore City leader more than, you know, any other leader, the mayor, governor, councilman, whatever the case may be.

So I think Dr. Jermaine Dawson, the CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools, would be a great, great person for the next man up.

And if I can give another person, our old supervisor, Kareem, Mr. Sean Conley.

I grew up in Mount Washington.

Actually went to Baltimore City Public Schools.

We were joking before we started about the schools that we went to.

I ended up after years in Baltimore City Public Schools at the Park School.

I don't know if that's good, bad, or indifferent, but ended up there.

And then one thing led to another, and I got into the property management business.

We've been doing this now for nearly 10 years.

And I wrote my book, Failure Factory: How Baltimore City Public Schools Deprive Taxpayers and Students of a Future, to really educate people on what's actually happening in public schools.

And I don't think a lot of people really know how the money is spent, where the money is put, where is it going, why do we continue to put billions of additional tax dollars into public education, but yet student outcomes don't improve?

Mm-hmm.

Two of them are elected by the people.

We already spoke about that, that the elections are coming up, and then one is a student member.

So the mayor has a lot of power here on Baltimore City Public Schools 'cause he's appointing nine of the members, and when most of the votes are a, a basic majority vote, you know, he, he pretty much gets what he wants.

And he put Mujahid Mohammed on that board in 2023, and then it was 2025 that the school board gave him this contract, this... that, that was worth upwards of $21 million.

Yeah.

So with the story, when I was laid off from coaching, I came back home and became a teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools.

And from there, I learned a lot that I didn't know at the time was going to even translate to any of this.

But Teaching children, you have to know how to manage a classroom, right? So that translated to refereeing, managing a game, managing players, managing coaches.

So I was in this summer program.

Um, they would take students from Baltimore City Public Schools, and you would go to Gilman, which is the all-boys prep school, for the summer, right?

Mm-hmm.

And it was a Black guy named Mr. Marner who, um, he had a field trip that's supposed to record in the studio.

Okay.

Yeah, I taught middle school in Baltimore City Public Schools for a little while.

However, I always worked at the Afro Summers and Holidays Club.

because that was my summer gig.

National test scores remain below where they were before the pandemic.

And in Maryland, billions of additional dollars have been committed to public education, which brings us to Baltimore Public Schools, one of the most well-funded school systems in the country.

It also is one of the lowest performing, and that's why Fox 45 launched an investigative unit dedicated to exploring why that funding hasn't translated to better outcomes for students.

This isn't just a Baltimore story.

If anything, they're getting worse, and we've been seeing this now for ma- maybe even decades.

So our intent was really to look into this.

So to answer your question, Baltimore City Schools in 2017, when we started Project Baltimore, in January of 2017, was getting $1.7 billion to educate about 82... uh, roughly 82,000 kids.

So today, the school system is getting $1.95 billion.

All right, everybody, we'll keep an eye on this ongoing, uh, little intraparty squabble going on.

It was announced over the weekend that Baltimore City Public Schools is severing its ties with the company that is owned by M- Moja- M- Majieed Muhammad, who is the school board member who was, uh, investigated.

Right now the FBI raided his Keys Development location in Baltimore County.

Come to find out, Brian, that this company, while he's a school board member, had a contract with Baltimore City Schools, which Liz Bowie and the Baltimore Banner are writing about and, uh, what the conflicts of interest.