‘Historic’: Sophomore becomes first Northwood High student to serve on county school board since 1978
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Ashlyn CampbellApril 28, 2026 11:37 a.m.
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Going into the 2026 Student Member of Montgomery County Board of Education election, Northwood High School sophomore Leul Dawit said he didn’t feel like he was the established candidate.
After all, a student from the Silver Spring school hadn’t served on the board since the position was established in 1978 and won by inaugural member David Naimon, who graduated in 1979 and is now the president of the Montgomery County Board of Elections.
So when Dawit learned that he had won Wednesday’s election, he said he was “more shocked than excited.”
“I did honestly expect it to be a lot more closer in margin,” Dawit told Bethesda Today on Tuesday morning. “This race has honestly been historic. It’s going to go on to become even more historical with the changes that are going on in the county,” referring to planned changes to school boundaries and programming.
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The 16-year-old won the election with 64% of the votes cast by 58,424 by middle and high school students, according to Wednesday a press release from Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). His opponent, Walter Johnson High School junior Reemey Ghermay received 36% of the vote.
In June, Dawit will be sworn in by the board for a one-year term, taking over the seat from Anuva Maloo, a senior at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring.
The student member of the board (SMOB) is a voting member of the school board and can weigh in on topics such as collective bargaining, capital and operating budgets, and school closings, reopenings and boundaries, but cannot vote on negative personnel actions. The position is unpaid; the student leader receives a $25,000 college scholarship as well as student service learning hours and one honors-level social studies credit.
Naimon, who served as the student board member from 1978 to 1979, told Bethesda Today on Tuesday that he was glad there is “a diversity of schools being represented” following Dawit’s election. While Northwood High was closed from 1985 to 2004 due to low enrollment, Naimon said more than half of student board members have come from four high schools: Rockville’s Richard Montgomery, Walt Whitman in Bethesda and Springbrook and Montgomery Blair in Silver Spring.
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“I’m glad to have a diversity of perspectives, a diversity of economic backgrounds, geographic areas, etc.,” Naimon said.
One of the biggest issues Dawit said he is focused on now that he will join the board, were the school board’s recent decisions regarding school boundaries and high school programming that will bring changes to students and families across the district.
The school board on March 26 approved new school boundary lines that would permanently move Rockville’s Thomas S. Wootton High School into the upcoming Crown High in Gaithersburg — along with shifting the district current programming into a regional model. The programming and attendance zone revisions are set to go into effect for the 2027-2028 school year.
The regional programming model would put an end to the consortia model available to some high school students, including the Downcounty Consortium, which includes Dawit’s school Northwood, Albert Einstein, Montgomery Blair, John F. Kennedy and Wheaton high.
“[I want to] make sure, once again, that [it’s] equitable … that we’re going to have, like, the adequate funding for those programs,” Dawit said. “That’s the whole reason why we’re, you know, redrawing our boundaries, looking at program analysis.”
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Dawit told Bethesda Today that he has been working in student leadership since he attended Brookhaven Elementary School in Rockville, where he campaigned to be the vice president of the school’s Student Government Association in fourth grade.
He lost, but the experience gave him his first taste of student advocacy.
“[As] an 8-year-old, of course I had things I genuinely cared about … but I asked some of my friends … ‘Hey, like, what do you guys want to see change?’ They started talking about toilet paper. That was, like, completely out of left field. I did not expect that at all,” Dawit said. “I feel like that was such a great first-time experience because I was able to really listen to my peers.”
Since then, Dawit has served as a field organization deputy for MoCo for Change, a youth social justice advocacy group, as well as a certified workshop presenter for the Maryland Association of Student Councils and an environmental education deputy for Eco MoCo, a student led environmental nonprofit. He also serves as student leadership coordinator for Students For Asylum and Immigrant Rights (FAIR) and as a historian for the Montgomery County Regional Student Government Association.
As a member of the school board, though, Dawit said he will be focused on “breaking the stigma that the [student member] doesn’t do anything.”
“A lot of the things that the SMOB would do, the Board Education would do — a lot of it definitely takes time,” Dawit said. “I want to make sure that students can really see that progress and feel it as well.”
Moving forward, Dawit said he wanted students to continue to be civically engaged.
“I want you guys to get excited, because a lot of stuff that we do is gonna affect all of you and future generations of MCPS students,” Dawit said of his constituents. “Being able to actually make that change and envision it in the way that you want it to be is definitely such an important thing.”
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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine