Reply to BCC Middle School Site Selction number 2

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Everyone who has joined this discussion needs to read the whole thread if you haven't already. I was on the site selection committee. The Lynnbrook site was not big enough, period. Very few sites in the cluster are.[/quote]

From the site selection advisory committee report, "Mr. Michael P. Shpur, architect, DOC, DFM, presented information regarding the minimum acreage needed to construct a middle school. Under optimal conditions, 10.1 buildable acres are needed. Site specific issues could result in more acreage being required. A number of the candidate sites have less than the 10.1 acres buildable acres. "  Lynnbrook was 10.4 acres, 8.5 build able.  Notes from the site selection indicate that discussion on the elimination of Lynbrook included the fact that using Lynbrook would result in the least loss of park land, but concern about the ability to program the fields for MS and HS and the neighborhoods concern to "keep" Lynbrook for a future ES.  A number of minority reports filed as attachments to the site selection disagree with the RCH selection and explain why.

I think the issue is that many people didn't feel like the site selection committee looked at these issues very creatively.  The normal template of requirements for a middle school (size, free space, etc.) was laid down and many pieces of land were rejected as being too small.  BCC is now an urban area and it's time to start rethinking what middle schools look like in our cluster.  Of course, MCPS would like to keep as close to the template process as possible, since it gives them economy of scale, but it doesn't actually fit our community.  We can't keep building sprawling 1 and 2 story facilities with single use fields.  At Lynnbrook, no consideration was given to ways in which a closely sited MS could actually work in synergy with the nearby high school.  Nor was any consideration given to linking the Lynbrook site with the NCC site for paired athletic uses (field space being a primary criticism of the Lynbrook site).

I also think it hurt the process, and thus contributes to the current dissatisfaction and desire to litigate, that the selection was conducted and then had to be re-conducted due to failure to comply originally with Open Meetings Act.  Many people perceived that the second go-round was just set up to rubber stamp the fact that initially, the BOE rejected the original site selection committee's selection of the RH park and chose by fiat RCH instead.
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