Schools
Race To Elect Dist. 1 BOE Member Hits Final Stretch
Zabrina Epps and David Murry both in the running for the open seat on Prince George's Board of Education.
Zabrina Epps and David Murray couldn’t be more different.
The first is a 40-year-old academic adviser at the Community College of Baltimore County while the latter is a 20-year-old student at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
Find out what's happening in Laurelwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
But what they want is exactly the same.
Both Epps and Murray are gunning for the only open seat on District 1’s Prince George’s County Board of Education. In seven weeks, the district that serves Laurel will say goodbye to six-year incumbent Rosalind Johnson and hello to one of the two candidates left on the ballot.
Find out what's happening in Laurelwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Epps, a Laurel native, earned 31 percent of the vote in the primary while Murray of Bowie received 56 percent in April. Epps has worked with County Executive Rushern Baker III and Laurel Mayor Craig Moe, and is a former budget analyst for the Maryland General Assembly.
Murray ran for the same seat in 2008 and was a student member of the Maryland State Board of Education while attending Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, according to The Baltimore Sun.
Both have been reaching out to as many voters as possible to spread their messages.
"I want the voters to know I'm accessible and will do whatever it takes to make the case on behalf of PGCPS," Epps told The Baltimore Sun earlier this week.
While Epps is focusing her campaign on finding a permanent superintendent for Prince George’s schools after William Hite left for the same position in Philadelphia, Murray wants to increase student achievement in the county, according to The Washington Post.
“We are lagging behind our peers,” he told The Washington Post. “You shouldn’t get a different level of education because you live in the side of Laurel that’s in Prince George’s, over the side that is in Howard or Anne Arundel counties.”
On Tuesday, the pair will be attending a 6 p.m. forum in the Rennie Forum Auditorium at Prince George's Community College in Largo. The event is a public forum for Board of Education candidates from all of the county’s districts and will be co-sponsored by the Women Voters of Prince George's County and the Prince George's County branch of the NAACP, The Sun said.
