What the Scrabble Tiles Revealed About a Mandate I Didn’t Choose
A racist incident in Harford County set an agenda before I ever arrived. The record shows a bipartisan mandate, not an imported one.
I started my listening tour in Harford County, Maryland, in 2018, and nearly every education leader I met raised the same incident. A small group of students at one of the county’s highest-performing high schools had used oversized posters shaped like Scrabble tiles to spell out a racial slur and display it inside the school. People in town called it the Scrabble incident. Some called it Scrabble-gate.
That year was also an election year for the Board of Education, and candidates from across the political spectrum told me the incident had shaped their decision to run. Harford leans conservative, even though Maryland as a whole does not, and the seats up for election that year drew candidates from both parties. None of them disagreed about this one thing. The board wanted our schools to do better, and I inherited that mandate on my first day.
The Meeting That Set the Direction
Early in my first year, I asked a community advocate I’d come to know for help. He assembled about twenty black students and parents to talk with me about their experience in our schools. The conversation opened slowly, the way conversations do before trust exists between the people in the room. It picked up momentum once one student said something the rest immediately recognized.
They rarely saw themselves in what they were learning. Our teachers were often unaware of non-white contributions to their subject areas, or they were uncomfortable raising race in the classroom at all. At the time, people of color made up between two and four percent of our teaching staff. That percentage has improved each year, but it will still take a long time to align with the district's student distribution fully.
That conversation shaped the entry plan I built over the following months, and it led directly to three efforts that ran side by side for years.
Training, Curriculum, and Grow Your Own
The district already required a multicultural learning course for certificated staff, so we built from that foundation rather than starting over. We ran a book study on Debbie Irving’s Waking Up White, beginning with senior leaders and expanding to principals. Irving spent a day with more than 115 of our leaders in February 2020, weeks before the pandemic reordered every priority in the district. Around the same time, a group of students launched Voices of Equity, a student-led movement rather than a school club. It delivered a panel on microaggressions to district leadership the month before that book study began. The movement spread to thirteen schools and outlasted the pandemic that nearly buried it.
The pandemic gave the curriculum team an opening. Since the district was already rebuilding instruction for virtual learning, the team used the summer of 2020 to replace outdated materials and bring in literary works from a wider range of authors, work that carried forward into every curriculum cycle after students returned to buildings.
The grow-your-own effort, which we later named Talent Pathways, came from a different source entirely. My work in North Carolina had taught me that HBCU education programs graduated fewer teachers than larger state schools, and that most of those graduates were hired away before they finished their degrees, often into urban districts far from Harford. Recruiting harder at job fairs was never going to change our numbers. Growing our own teachers from students who already lived in the county gave us a better shot at both hiring and keeping a more representative staff. I set a target of 100 homegrown teachers a year, against a normal hiring need of 200 to 300.
When the Landscape Changed
Critics have since described this work as a partisan agenda that the administration imposed on a community that didn’t ask for it. The record says otherwise. A bipartisan board handed me this mandate in 2018, elected candidates who ran on the Scrabble incident specifically, and no member of that board dissented about the priority at the time. The agenda came from Harford County’s own history, not from outside it.
What changed was the arrival of a new political current in public education, and it put every equity effort under suspicion regardless of where it began. Voices of Equity faced accusations that school leaders had scripted their talking points, despite every word coming from students describing their own experiences. The curriculum drew scrutiny it would not have faced five years earlier. It held up because we had built it on a foundation wide enough to withstand the attack, not because the attack never came.
A Final Thought
Talent Pathways students who started in our teacher academy as ninth graders in 2020 are now finishing their degrees. They will walk back into Harford County classrooms in the next year or two, teaching in the same schools where a handful of black students and parents once sat in a room with me and said they never saw themselves in what they were learning. Neither of us knew, in that room, how long it would take, or how much the ground under the work would shift before it was done.
Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools from 2018 to 2026 and Wilson County Schools from 2011 to 2016. Subscribe for weekly posts on educational leadership, equity, and district transformation.
