For only the second time in our city’s history, voters will get to directly elect members of Baltimore’s Board of School Commissioners this year—and Charm City Indivisible is thrilled to endorse Domonique Flowers for one of those two elected seats! His long history of working on behalf of young people, and his careful, honest engagement with the real challenges they face, has earned our wholehearted support.

Who Is Domonique Flowers

Ask Domonique why he’s running, and he’ll point you to a date: December 13, 1999, the day he took a job as an assistant daycare instructor. He didn’t know it then, but it was the beginning of a quarter-century of work with children and families—as a mentor, a substitute teacher, and a volunteer education attorney representing students in IEP and 504 meetings to win them the support that the law guarantees.

That through-line—showing up for the kids the system is most likely to overlook—runs through everything he does. He’s served on the Baltimore City Schools Ethics Panel and Public Safety Advisory Commission, and as co-chair of the Maryland Commission on Hate Crime Response and Prevention’s education committee. And he holds another important role too—a Baltimore City Schools parent, whose son attends Thomas Johnson Elementary/Middle. Domonique’s work in education didn’t start in Baltimore, but he’s chosen this city, building his family and career here, and is now asking to serve the system his own child depends on.

When we asked what prepared him for the hardest part of the job—holding the school system’s CEO accountable—we were impressed by the fact that he didn’t reach for a title. Instead he talked about his experience mentoring students, because he knows that he can’t do any part of his job well if he ever loses sight of who he’s serving. He has the oversight experience, too: he talked about managing budgets, tracking organizational spending, and serving on both government and nonprofit boards. But he grounded his answer in service first, rather than credentials—and that’s exactly the instinct we want in a school board member.

Fighting for the Students Who Need It Most

Domonique’s deepest expertise—and his most personal commitment—is to students with disabilities. As an education attorney, he has sat across the table from school systems and fought to win children the accommodations they’re legally owed, so he knows exactly where kids fall through the gaps. He told us that the most common type of failure in the current system is mundane but costly: schools that don’t proactively review a student’s IEP or 504 plan at the start of the year, leaving parents to chase services while their child is already struggling. His fix is to put the initiative on the school, not the parent.

More broadly, he wants to close these gaps systematically: training every staff member in inclusive practice, expanding early intervention programs so needs are caught sooner, designing materials to be accessible from the start, and protecting funding for the special educators, paraprofessionals, and therapists who do the work—especially as federal support grows uncertain.

That same equity lens shapes how he sees Baltimore’s most underserved schools. Rather than judging them on raw proficiency numbers alone, he wants to look school-by-school at growth, teacher experience, and turnover, then direct wraparound supports—health and mental health services, tutoring, family engagement—where they’re needed most. And he was candid about the hard part: when the data demands it, he’d move resources from a better-resourced school to a struggling one, knowing the pushback that will bring from better-off families, and prepared to make the case anyway.

Domonique is clear-eyed about the threats to public education, and his instinct is to defend it. He’s skeptical of voucher programs, which he sees as draining resources from public schools to fund private institutions held to no comparable standard of accountability. He’d prioritize traditional public schools while simultaneously holding charters to rigorous academic and ethical standards—and when a school is failing, he weighs accountability against the human cost of closure, mindful that for many kids school isn’t just where they learn, it’s also an important source of nutrition, safety, and community.

He’s just as committed to the students most under threat right now. Drawing on his Hate Crime Commission work, he wants explicit anti-discrimination and anti-bullying policies that protect LGBTQ+ students, with staff trained to support them. For immigrant and undocumented families, he backs limits on ICE access to campuses, policies that prohibit the sharing of student data without a judicial warrant, distribution of “Know Your Rights” materials to students and families in multiple languages, and connections to community organizations offering pro bono legal assistance. And as a former union shop steward, he understands organized labor from the inside and is committed to genuine partnership with the Baltimore Teachers Union, because he knows that when teachers feel supported, students can thrive.

Wisdom From Experience

What impressed us most wasn’t any single position—it was how Domonique thinks. On the hardest questions, he doesn’t reach for the easy slogan; he reasons through the problem, shares his thought process, and comes up with solutions that actually make sense. We deeply appreciate that thoughtfulness, because it makes him a partner whose judgment we can trust, and that matters far more to us than complete agreement on every single topic. 

On book bans and challenges, for example, his first instinct is transparency and parent involvement—not because he wants individual parents controlling what’s on the shelves, but because he believes that people who feel genuinely heard are far more likely to respect a fair process. And he draws an unambiguous line: he will not accept a system where one parent’s complaint can pull a book from a library, however that process is dressed up.

We saw similar nuance in his thoughts on school safety. He takes the reality of violence in schools seriously and doesn’t pretend there’s an easy answer. On school police, he was candid that before changing anything he’d want to understand how officers are actually deployed—drawing on his service on the Public Safety Advisory Commission, where he’s worked on rebuilding trust between police and the communities they serve. He’s clear-eyed about the documented harms of policing, and he wants any approach to school safety to include serious investment in mental health, social-emotional learning, and trauma-informed support. He was also honest with us about what he still wants to learn before he acts—which is exactly the disposition these decisions require.

That same instinct shapes how Domonique thinks about discipline. Suspensions and expulsions, he points out, mostly just remove a child from the one place that might actually help them—so he wants real intervention long before it ever comes to that. He pointed to a truancy-court program he’s worked with directly, run with the University of Baltimore, that took a high-absenteeism school and, rather than simply punishing students, sat down with them to understand the barriers keeping them away—and then measured whether the fixes worked.

He knows that these interventions can work because they did for him. Domonique shared with us (notably, over his wife’s advice that he should keep this to himself during the campaign!) that he was a self-described troubled student who got into trouble often, until a youth intervention program changed everything for him—it turned his life around and in fact introduced him to the legal field in which he ultimately built his career. He knows the impact that these kinds of programs had on his own life, and he wants to make sure every struggling student has that same opportunity to thrive. He told us that he wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and he knows that’s the case for many of the students he aims to serve. He’s running because he wants them to know that, just like him, with the right resources and opportunities, they too can succeed. 

Why This Matters Now

Public schools are under real pressure—from insufficient funding to federal threats against marginalized students to book bans that limit what our students can learn. Baltimore needs board members who will meet this moment with both conviction and competence. Domonique brings 25 years of experience, a clear set of values, and a concrete plan built around three priorities: ensuring stable, safe learning environments; supporting the parents and educators who raise and teach our kids; and expanding opportunity so that students graduate ready for college, careers, or whatever comes next. He has spent his life doing this work—and it’s work that mirrors our own: long before this race, he was registering voters and teaching civics in city high schools, because he believes, as we do, that the people closest to a problem deserve real power over it. We couldn’t agree more, and we couldn’t be prouder to support his campaign.

How to Support Domonique Flowers

The Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners helps decide the future of every child in our public school system, and Domonique Flowers has the experience and values to serve them well. If you agree, here’s what you can do:

• Donate to support his campaign in these final weeks
• Volunteer to help reach voters before Election Day
• Talk to your neighbors—tell them why you’re voting for Domonique and encourage them to join you
• Vote for Domonique Flowers! Check your registration and find your polling place today. You can request a mail-in ballot and vote early from June 11 to 18, or vote on Election Day, June 23.

Baltimore’s students deserve a leader who has spent his life showing up for them, and who brings both heart and real expertise to the work. Domonique Flowers is that leader. We’re voting for him, and we hope you will too.

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A note on our endorsement process:

Our endorsement process begins with a thorough questionnaire, which we make available to all declared candidates in a race. Completed questionnaires are evaluated, and candidates who score well are invited to an interview with our endorsement committee. In some cases, a sitting officeholder with a strong legislative record may qualify for a streamlined track: in place of the questionnaire, our committee prepares a review of the candidate’s record to ground the interview. Because this path could otherwise advantage incumbents, we hold those candidates to a higher qualifying standard, not a lower one. After all interviews are complete, we deliberate and announce our endorsement of the candidate who most aligns with our values.

Charm City Indivisible evaluates all candidates using the following criteria: alignment with our values, thoughtful policy positions, demonstrated commitment to constituent engagement, and a track record and/or clear vision of fighting for working people over wealthy interests. We apply these standards equally to all candidates we evaluate. We believe voters deserve to understand not just who we endorse, but how and why we made that decision.