With a unanimous vote, the school board passed the Fiscal Year 2026 proposed budget at a May 22 meeting. No amendments were made on the night of the vote, but not because members didn’t have any.
The school board follows Robert’s Rules of Order, a parliamentary procedure manual which establishes guidelines for orderly ruling. Under Robert’s Rules, members may only postpone an order to the next meeting and for no longer. When it came time to vote on the budget, Hunter Mill district representative Melanie Meren moved “to suspend the rules and consider the question of postponing indefinitely the proposed budget amendments.”
The board first had to vote to suspend Robert’s Rules. They could not debate the motion before they voted and it needed a two-thirds majority to pass. Once the board voted 8-4 in favor, suspending the rules, they discussed the possibility of indefinitely postponing amendments to the budget, meaning they would never hear them.
“Having motions come to the dais at this late stage doesn’t give us the opportunity to really hear them out fully,” Meren said at the May 22 meeting. “We want to be transparent, but if we did every single conversation at the dais, we would never be able to get our work done.”
The board, excluding members-at-large Ryan McElveen and Ilryung Moon, Mason district representative Richardy Anderson and Mount Vernon district representative Mateo Dunne, voted in favor of Meren’s motion.
“I urge my colleagues to give their peers the opportunity to present their ideas,” McElveen said at the May 22 meeting. “You don’t have to agree with them; I don’t agree with all of them. Regardless how you feel about the proposals, cutting them out is not a very collegial thing to do, so let their voices be heard.”
The school board voted in September that all motions must be submitted to the Chair at least 48 hours before a regular meeting. Moon said in the May 22 meeting that the scheduling of the board’s work session on May 20 did not allow members enough time to submit amendments before the Chair would no longer accept them. The work session in question started at 5:00 p.m. and ended at 8:30 p.m.
“By the time I got home, it was almost close to nine o’clock,” Moon said at the May 22 meeting. “[I] sit down, put down [my] head, reflect on what transpired at the work session and craft something and share with my colleagues. First thing I got was ‘woah that was not shared within 48 hours.’ Well folks, that work session’s schedule did not end until it came within the 48 hour window. I am sickened to my stomach.”
Dunne had amendments slated for discussion at the May 22 meeting, but they were not heard as a result of Meren’s motion. At the meeting, Dunne said that according to the results of a survey he took, the district was short approximately 60 school safety and security specialists and that neither staff nor students felt safe at school.
“What message does it send to our community if we decide to indefinitely postpone the safety of our schools, staff and students?” Dunne said at the May 22 meeting. “President George Bush once said ‘message: we care.’ Is our message now ‘message: we don’t care,’ because we’re putting it off indefinitely?”
Before they voted to postpone the amendments, members debated the value of hiring more social workers or security staff in the schools of FCPS in connection to the amendment Dunne intended to make. Because the board postponed all amendments indefinitely, however, the issue was never resolved.
“All of those things require dollars and will create better experiences for our students, however, that is not even the reason that I am speaking tonight,” Anderson said at the May 22 meeting. “I am speaking about this process that we are engaging in right now which essentially quells debate. Not having the opportunity to talk about things, it’s dismaying to me and I don’t think that’s the right way to go as a body.”
