Mark Mann Excellence and Harmony Award

2025 Winner

Dr. Joshua Fine, principal at Flower Hill Elementary School, is this year’s winner of the Mark Mann Excellence and Harmony Award.

The Mark Mann award is presented annually to an MCPS administrator who has shown exceptional performance in promoting academic excellence, positive human relations and community outreach. 

Fine, principal at Flower Hill since 2020, has transformed the Gaithersburg school by increasing literacy achievement across all demographic areas and significantly outpacing state and district proficiency levels for Emerging Multilingual Learners. In the winter of 2021, he was approached about participating in a structured literacy pilot program for kindergarten, first and second graders and he jumped at the chance. In two years, student achievement has significantly increased across races and service groups. The program, for first and second graders, allows students to have support with their language acquisition skills and teaches them how to read and write in an environment that provides targeted instruction.

In just one year, according to the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) literacy assessment, the proficiency rate increased by 32 percent for first graders and by 11 percent for second graders. The proficiency rate increased by 25 percent for Emerging Multilingual Learners in first and second grades; by 23 percent for Hispanic students, and 24 percent for students with disabilities in the same grades. This growth in data is possible because of the constant communication and data meetings Fine has with teachers.

There have been other significant achievements under his leadership:

• After developing a schoolwide mission to cultivate a sense of belonging through structured social-emotional learning, monthly town halls and schoolwide traditions, Flower Hill saw a more than 50 percent drop in out-of-school suspensions and an 11.6 percent decrease in chronic absenteeism.

• Increasing opportunities for parental involvement by creating multiple open houses, adding spring parent-teacher conferences and hosting monthly engagement nights, which resulted in 97 percent of parents reporting “they belong” at school.

• Enhancing teacher retention and leadership by fostering regular two-way communication, establishing new team leader roles, promoting staff-led professional development and nominating teachers for districtwide awards, resulting in an 88 percent teacher retention rate.

• Implementing meaningful math collaborative planning structures that enabled general education, English Language Development and special education teachers to analyze student data and plan for success, serving as a model for districtwide professional development and recorded for use during summer training.

Fine believes that collaboration and teamwork are key to student academic success. He is always willing to sit down with teachers to hear new ideas on how to make learning engaging and fun for students. He has an open-door policy with parents and students; he also holds monthly town hall meetings with students.

He is rarely in his office because he is often in the bus loop, hallways and classrooms greeting and visiting with students and staff. He shows up at every PTA meeting, PTA events, including the very popular TruckMania, and cheers on students during swim meets in the summer. His positive energy, innovative style and fierce advocacy on behalf of students are contagious.

Fine is the president of the Maryland Association of Elementary School Principals, and a member of the Maryland Department of Education’s Blueprint for Maryland’s Future Expert Review Team.

He began his career as a middle school social studies and ESOL teacher before serving as an assistant school administrator, assistant principal, and principal intern in elementary and secondary schools. He has a bachelor’s degree in secondary education from American University, a master’s in urban education policy from Brown University and a doctoral degree in educational leadership from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.