State of Maryland is Quietly Modifying COMAR with Emergency Regulations to Usurp Local School Boards
- Fellow Editors
- Jul 24
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 27
Imagine being a pro basketball player that follows every rule of the game and makes a clean shot destined to go in with a swish. While the ball is midair, the referee immediately conspires to change the rules with the NBA and extends the court and the basket to be 3X further than where it was at the time of the shot. Impossible right? It's not impossible in Maryland.
Did you know that the State of Maryland has a system to bypass the legislature in order to create and change COMAR regulations on the fly, and without the entire General Assembly or a legislative bill?
This is done through a committee of the General Assembly called the JOINT COMMITTEE ON ADMINISTRATIVE, EXECUTIVE, AND LEGISLATIVE REVIEW (AELR).
Establishment
The Joint Committee on Administrative, Executive, and Legislative Review (AELR Committee) was originally created in 1964 as a joint standing committee known as the Committee on Legislative Review. It was reconstituted as a statutory committee and renamed in Chapters 400 and 699 of 1972.
Membership
The AELR Committee is composed of 20 members – 10 senators appointed by the President of the Senate and 10 delegates appointed by the Speaker of the House. Each political party is represented in approximately the same proportion as its membership in each house, and each major standing committee of the General Assembly is represented on the committee. There is a Senate chair and a House chair of the committee who alternate each calendar year as the presiding chair.
Principal Function – Generally
The AELR Committee functions as the watchdog of the General Assembly in overseeing the activities of State agencies as they relate to regulations. The committee’s primary function is to review any regulations that are proposed for adoption by a unit of the Executive Branch of State government to determine whether the regulations conform both with the statutory authority of the unit and the legislative intent of the statute under which the regulations are proposed.
You can read more about the AELR here:
Although a governor can execute regulation without the AELR, their existence is an illusion of formality. The abuse comes when a proposed regulation is declared as an EMERGENCY when there is no emergency.
Emergency Regulations - Emergency regulations, which bypass the normal public notice and comment period, remain in effect for a limited period of time – not to exceed 180 days – to meet exigent circumstances. Although emergency regulations are not published in the Maryland Register before adoption, notice of the committee’s receipt of the regulation is posted on the Maryland General Assembly’s website (www.mlis.state.md.us). If a member of the committee requests a public hearing on the emergency adoption of a regulation, the committee must hold the hearing. If no public hearing is requested, staff to the committee may poll the committee members on the emergency regulation as soon as 10 business days after receipt of the regulation. Approval by the committee is required for an emergency regulation to take effect.
If there's anything we learned from government during the COVID-19 fiasco, was the use of emergency regulation. As overreaching as that was, it is even more overreaching to casually use it when there's no emergency - simply abusing the people for the political advantage of the state.
The State of Maryland is secretly modifying COMAR behind the scenes without a bill or legislative session because of what the school board is doing in Somerset County. The SCBOE is terminating their superintendent, and the due process timeline for a superintendent to request a hearing before the board is currently 60 days under COMAR.
In the middle of the 60 days, the State Superintendent requested emergency regulation from the Joint Committee on Administrative, Executive, and Legislative Affairs to quietly modify COMAR to change the stay from 60 days to 180 days in order to hogtie a local school board and keep a local superintendent employed and in place past their termination no matter how bad, incompetent, negligent, insubordinate, or immoral they may be. The local superintendent doesn't have to ensure the academic proficiency of students or even show up to work.
This 60-day rule has been in place since 1963, and now in 2025 it's suddenly an emergency that requires a minimum of 180 days. One can argue that even 60 days is extreme, as no citizen receives more than 30 days in the real world.
School boards are starting to be flipped to a conservative-majority across the liberal State of Maryland. Because these boards are cleaning house and firing their woke superintendents, the democrats want to change the rules of the game so that they can exert power to override local boards.
As a result, the state wants to grant the State Superintendent the power to defy local boards in order to forcibly keep a superintendent in place against the will of the board, even if children are suffering. This has union all over it. It's not a state of emergency except for the teachers' unions and their democrat counterparts.
Although Somerset County triggered this, it's not a Somerset County issue per se. It's really a statewide issue that will affect every county in Maryland. The teachers' union is behind the State Superintendent, who has conspired with elected officials (both Democrats and Republicans) to immediately modify the existing legislation.
Since legislators would have a difficult time passing this as a bill, they are underhandedly doing this by classifying as an EMERGENCY through the committee. The members of the committee have already cast their vote and it passed. It takes effect on Monday, July 28, 2025 if a hearing is not requested by then.
The regulatory change reads as follows:
Education, State Board of
Emergency/Proposed Regulations
DLS Control No. 25-157
State Board of Education: State School Administration:
State Superintendent of Schools: COMAR 13A.01.02.01
According to the board, this regulation amends an existing regulation to authorize the State Superintendent of Schools (State Superintendent) to extend the length of a stay ordered by the State Superintendent for an action taken by a local board of education (local board) beyond the 60 day duration under specified circumstances.
This can be stalled if a hearing is requested by a member of the committee. We reached out to delegates and senators, and nobody will file the request for a hearing. Senator Johnny Mautz (R) filed a request for a hearing, but withdrew it once Senator Mary Beth Carozza (R) harassed Mautz along with other members of the Republican party to withdraw the request. Mautz shamefully stated that he will not refile the request for a hearing.
Senator Mary Beth Carozza has been working overtime to sabotage a possible hearing as she is in bed with the teachers' unions. On other educational issues, Carozza has historically been a saboteur and obstructionist by undermining the well-being of children, while protecting the interest of herself, the teachers' unions, and the Democrat Party. She has done so on numerous occasions whenever we have reached out to her on educational matters and legislative affairs.
Regardless of political affiliation, 97% of elected officials do not genuinely represent the people, and they work to satisfy their own belly.
Usurping Local Control
A local school board is solely responsible for selecting and employing its one direct employee—the superintendent. State officials, including delegates or senators, have no rightful role in interfering with the employment decisions of an elected school board.
This is a HUGE power grab to override local control.
Back in 1974, Chief Justice Warren Burger of the U.S. Supreme Court wrote: “No single tradition in public education is more deeply rooted than local control over the operation of schools.”
This "emergency" violates local control as defined by Maryland Education Article § 4-101:
(a) Educational matters that affect the counties shall be under the control of a county board of education in each county.
(b) Each county board shall seek in every way to promote the interests of the schools under its jurisdiction.
It's ironic how the State of Maryland wants to bypass due process in order to modify due process.
It's also ironic how a local superintendent can terminate a teacher, administrator, bus driver, or anyone else and they don't get protections under emergency regulation.
Every Maryland citizen, every county school board, and every county commission/council should be very concerned by this politically-conspired effort to usurp local control as it will have devastating long-term consequences for the wellbeing of our citizens.
Fellows & Editors
July 24, 2025 - Copyright DelmarvaPTC.org
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