(BALTIMORE – December 24, 2025) – When I first saw the news, I said to myself, Are you kidding me? Surely, you’re joking. No disrespect, but I’ve seen a snow job before. And for me, this was a classic – even to the point of extending her contract. In case you didn’t hear, Dr. Sonja Santelises has been voted the top public school superintendent in the state of Maryland and is a finalist for the national honor.
Let me be clear: This is a smack in the face of every parent of every child in a Baltimore City school.
The data doesn’t lie, even when the press releases do. Baltimore City students rank fourth worst in the nation in fourth-grade math. Fourth worst in eighth-grade math. Fifth worst in reading. These are the same scores that have declined in every category since Santelises took over in 2016 – and they’ve fallen faster than the national average for large urban districts.
This happened while the budget ballooned by $400 million to $1.7 billion. We’re spending more and getting less. And the only outlet asking hard questions is Fox 45, while everyone else runs City Schools’ press releases like gospel.
The Alonso-Santelises Pipeline of Failure
I’m not sure who Santelises is politically connected to, but I can say without a doubt that she is a continuation of the Andrés Alonso massacre. Remember him? The outsider – a New Yorker – was brought in by Mayor O’Malley, who removed 75% of Baltimore’s principals by 2011. He removed three-quarters of the institutional knowledge of our school system without blinking. Civil rights leader Marvin “Doc” Cheatham warned us then that these replacements wouldn’t understand or respect the culture of our communities. He was right.
Alonso didn’t come to love our children. He laid the groundwork for the dastardly future that is present here and now. And who did he recommend as his successor? Santelises. The cycle continues.
I don’t care who you go and get to run the schools – if they are not vested, they will not make a difference. If your children do not attend city schools, you are not vested. Go somewhere else.
The Deafening Silence
But what is most baffling is the silence. Nobody has said a word. Now, I waited, and I waited because I had a lot on my plate with school and all. However, somebody has to say it: Santelises has got to go.
Even more, why – given all of the intelligence we have in this city – why have we not begged Dr. Andrey Bundley to take over the schools? Did I miss something? Clearly, that man has exactly what is necessary to possibly save thousands of our young people from the penal system. We all see it every day. Our young people have little faith in the traditional paths, and we need to understand how much we have failed them. The youth are only a reflection of the adult behavior they see.
What We Actually Need
Truth be told, we need an education czar. Someone who takes education seriously. Someone willing to make home visits, create adult education opportunities for parents, and – you may as well put employment assistance in there, too.
We act so goofy. We asked for the power, and now that we have it, we don’t use it for what we said we were all about. I cannot blame white people for the fiasco at school headquarters. Nope. There are too many Black people involved who are clearly paid for their silence.
What gets me most is the $400 million that yielded below-par results, and the fact that we accept it without question. This is beyond me. No outrage. No protests. No marches. Just silence – which is seen as permission to abuse our children further.
The Bottom Line
When only one school out of 150-plus earns a five-star rating – and it’s Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, an exam school – while six schools languish at one star, we don’t have a success story. We have a crisis being rebranded as progress.
When your “noteworthy results” place you fourth worst in the nation, you don’t deserve Superintendent of the Year. You deserve a pink slip.
Our children deserve leaders who are invested in them, who live among them, and who send their own children to city schools. They deserve transparency, not press releases that omit their fourth-worst ranking. They deserve a system that doesn’t celebrate being less terrible than during a pandemic.
Most of all, they deserve better than silence from a community that fought too hard for control of these schools to watch them fail quietly.
It’s time to speak up. It’s time for a change. It’s time for Santelises to go.
