With nearly 160,000 MCPS students spanning the largest district in Maryland, the voices of individual students are often left unheard and their issues unresolved. The biggest decisions regarding students are made behind closed doors. While it may seem impossible to be understood and listened to, the Student Member of the Board makes it a possibility.
The Student Member of the Board, informally known as the SMOB, gets a seat at the table where these decisions are made. The SMOB is the voice of the students, the representative of the struggles and tribulations faced every day by students, and in the SMOB’s unique position, they have the power to make change in the experiences of students. Each year students rise to the challenge to become the next MCPS SMOB, and this year one of the candidates was a fellow Patriot: junior Tyson Nakashima.
The SMOB campaign process featured a quick turnaround time. Applications for SMOB passed on Jan. 23 and on Wednesday, Feb. 19, the MCPS Nomination Convention decided the two final candidates voted on by up to 13 delegates from each MCPS middle and high school who will act as representatives. The event took place at Watkins Mill.
Heading into the nominating convention, Nakashima worked diligently to spread his campaign to MCPS schools by meeting, calling or visiting. In the short time following the approval of his candidacy, Nakashima visited Sligo Middle School, Whitman, Wheaton, Hoover Middle School and Northwest. He had arrangements to meet with the feeder schools, Cabin John and Frost as well.
Nakashima planned to visit or call Blair, Churchill, Quince Orchard, Kennedy and Richard Montgomery. Despite snow cancellations on Eastern Middle School and Magruder, Nakashima planned on rescheduling these visits to ensure his outreach to these MCPS students. As part of his campaign, Nakashima said he believes it is crucial to visit middle schools even though they are often overlooked due to their smaller vote. “I want to make everyone’s voice heard and I plan to do that by visiting as many schools as I can and genuinely taking their ideas,” Nakashima said.
Nakashima’s platform revolved around four core points: communication, safety, accessibility and college preparedness. Communication is an important part of Nakashima’s platform as it is one of the main reasons he decided to run for SMOB. Nakashima said communication is the most crucial part of any leadership role as it is how a leader can accurately represent their constituents. A communicative SMOB is vital as the “SMOB allows the Board of Education to get insight and perspective from a student who has personally gone through those problems,” campaign manager and junior Wrik Datta said.
To prove his dedication to connection with MCPS students as SMOB, Nakashima planned on having weekly SMOB check-ins and lives on multiple social media platforms where students would be able to ask questions, report problems and hold him accountable. Nakashima did his due diligence for, “his campaign to make sure that it is following exactly what students need or want,” campaign team member and sophomore Shruthi Venkatesh said.
For his second platform point, Nakashima said that safety should be MCPS’ number one goal, especially as a student who has been exposed to two school shooting threats and four bomb threats. He values the safety of students but believes these events should also, “serve as a reminder that we need to make a bigger effort to keep everyone safe,” Nakashima said.
As for safety in the classroom, Nakashima wanted to implement training procedures into the current health curriculum, including first aid training like AED use, Heimlich maneuver, general first aid and shooter first aid training.
His third point was accessibility. The accessibility plan ranged from fighting the digital divide by guaranteeing Chromebooks for all students, to adding emergency bus stops during hazardous weather conditions to reduce the number of students required to walk to school. Finally, Nakashima planned on advocating for college preparedness. His plan was to help MCPS students stand out through first aid classes, sponsored college essay reviews, early access to SAT prep, leadership and communication training and leadership training in the administrative part of MCPS. Ensuring that MCPS is accessible to all is “vital to having an equal and equitable education for all,” Nakashima said.
In the MCPS Nomination Convention, Nakashima was one of 10 candidates who ran for the position. The convention featured two elimination rounds in which votes of delegates would determine which candidates would move on. By the end of the convention, delegates voted Peter Boyko from Northwest and Anuva Maloo from Blair as the two SMOB candidates for the 2025-26 school year.
