ROCK HALL — The value of education is not lost on the new superintendent of Kent County Public Schools, Mary Boswell-McComas
Raised in south Baltimore, McComas said she learned at an early age that education is a bridge out of poverty.
“I loved school as a child. I grew up very poor and had a rather challenging childhood economically, and education was a very stable place, and it was also a place my family emphasized through education you can get out of poverty. So, it was valued,” McComas, who has a doctoral degree in education, said during an interview last week in her office at KCPS’ headquarters in Rock Hall.
She began her career nearly three decades ago as a high school social studies teacher in Harford County Public Schools and later became a school administrator, most recently serving as principal of Sparrows Point Middle School in Baltimore County.
McComas majored in history at Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, where she also earned a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction.
What do you do with a history degree?
You teach, she said.
McComas traces her love of history to her father, a Word War II veteran.
“In our house, growing up, we always had National Geographic and Smithsonian magazines, and my father read the newspaper every day,” McComas said.
“He always said, ‘You have to know what is going on in the world’ because as an 18-year-old, 19-year-old he was drafted into World War II and sent around the world, so it was really impressed upon me to understand what was happening in the world around me.”
McComas believes that her experience in the classroom gives her a unique perspective on the challenges that teachers face today.
“What I think frustrates teachers, or at least what frustrated me, is when we overcomplicate things and we want to pull teachers’ energies away from teaching,” she said in the July 23 interview. “Teachers love to teach, and they love to plan for instruction, they love to create materials to support instruction. When we place on them additional administrative requirements that starts to kind of bury them under bureaucracy.”
McComas said she would like to streamline the administrative tasks placed on teachers whenever possible to allow them to focus on their core mission, which is teaching and learning.
She said she recognizes that some responsibilities are still going to fall on the teachers’ shoulders, such as lunch duty, but hopes that through a collaborative process and conversations everyone will be able to understand why certain tasks are necessary.
A collaborative approach to learning is something the new superintendent also hopes to establish with parents and guardians.
McComas said she wants to hold community meetings throughout the county to gain input from parents, guardians and students about what they would like to see from the school system.
She’d like to know what does adequate communication from KCPS look like to parents — is it email, robocall, text message — and what does strong, robust communication look like to them.
She would strongly encourage all community members to attend these meetings, even if they do not have a student in the school system.
“The more robust engagement we get, that’s more data. That’s more information for us to reflect on and then develop appropriate strategies to address those needs,” she said.
McComas believes that one of the biggest challenges for KCPS is also one of its biggest blessings — its small size, especially when it comes to putting into practice Maryland’s Blueprint for the Future.
Kent County is ahead of the game when it comes to implementing early childhood education programs such as pre-K because there was space in the school buildings for the additional classrooms.
McComas said it will take the larger school systems more than a decade to find space for their pre-K programs.
Of the landmark legislation passed in 2021, McComas said the Blueprint was a fantastic vision for education for the state, but the challenge is going to be implementing it.
“Who doesn’t want to have one of the highest performing school systems around the globe?” McComas asked rhetorically.
“We all want that, and we all want that for our young people. All the jurisdictions and the state are in conversations all the time about what part of the Blueprint is working and what parts need adjustment to make them workable for all the school systems.”
She said it’s going to be challenging for a small school system like KCPS to implement the lofty goals of the Blueprint, but all school districts will be challenged.
“The challenge points are just in different places,” McComas said.
A strong partnership with the Kent County Commissioners and the District 36 delegation to the Maryland General Assembly will be key to making sure the Blueprint in Kent County is a success, she said.
“It’s going to take many voices to make sure Kent County’s needs are represented in Annapolis and with the AIB [Accountability and Implementation Board] around implementation of Blueprint,” McComas told The Evening Enterprise. “The Blueprint is a strong vision that we need to work toward, but it’s a work in progress. The stronger our partnership is with our commissioners and state delegation, the more success we will have.”
McComas has experience in implementing plans with lots of moving parts and strong leadership as she served in the U.S. Army Reserve, attaining the rank of captain and company commander. Her area of expertise was logistics.
“What I learned in the Army is how to lead and the power of engaging people’s talents. People will do whatever needs to be done when they know you are right there with them, you believe in them, and you are going to optimize everyone’s talent,” she said. “No two people have the same superpower and when you learn how to orchestrate those superpowers so that everyone not only survives but thrives, people will commit, and amazing things can happen when people commit and build on each other’s strengths.”
One of McComas’ priorities for year one is building on Kent County Public Schools’ “unique strengths.”
“Our core mission [as a school system] is academics, so we naturally want to continue to push our academic achievements up in terms of how our students are performing on multiple measures — we have our state assessments, we have our Measures of Academic Progress, as well as College and Career Readiness [standard], as well as graduation rates,” she said.
The goal, naturally, “is to make sure we are striving to be the best performing school system in the state, and how do we leverage the legislation and budget and community engagement to help get us there.”
McComas said she wants the school system to become an active voice in the community about what is happening with Kent County’s young people and highlight the “amazing things” they are doing.
She pointed to Bryce Jacobs, a rising sophomore at Kent County High School who donated his prize money from last month’s Guardian of the Pearl fishing tournament to the Rock Hall Volunteer Fire Company’s new ambulance fund.
“That’s a remarkable young person who is reflective of all the amazing qualities of Kent County,” McComas said.
McComas’ first day as Kent County’s schools chief was July 1; the contract is for four years.
She presided over her first Board of Education meeting on July 8.
McComas succeeds Karen Couch, who in January announced that she would retire at the end of June.
McComas said when the superintendent position opened here, she “jumped at the opportunity.” She’d visited Betterton in the summers as a youth, and had hoped one day to retire in Kent County.
She has moved to Kent, while her husband, a middle school librarian who is a few months away from retirement, and their youngest of three children, a rising senior in high school, are remaining in the family home in Harford County.
It’s too early to tell, but McComas, jokingly, said the distance may have an upside.
“In a way I’m closer to my son now than when we lived in the same house, because I call him on the phone, and he actually talks to me versus just grunting at me as he passed me in the kitchen.”
To read more about McComas’ background, the superintendent report for July or the superintendent search, visit the KCPS website, www.kent.k12.md.us.
Trish McGee, owner and publisher of The Evening Enterprise, is an elected member of the Kent County Board of Education. She did not contribute to this reporting.
