Reply to Emergency Legal Filing Seeks to Halt MCPS Plan to Close Wootton High School

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Imagine paying all your high taxes for decades, only to have your local school closed down and your students bussed miles away to another community.   Like putting away money for a new car, only to have it given to your neighbors on the next block over, who offer to let you come and use it instead of getting your own.  
I hope they prevail.
[/quote]

Did you just figure out you live in a society? Taxes fund public schools, but they are not tuition payments. You pay them even if you don’t have kids. And kids who live in cheap apartments and pay very little taxes still get to go to the same school. You pay taxes to the county, and the county decides how to spend it based on who we all vote for. Just like you don’t get better postal service or trash collection or national defense based on how much you pay in taxes, you also don’t get better schools.[/quote]

I don’t think anyone is confused about how taxes work. No one is saying taxes are tuition or that paying more should get you a better school.

The issue is simpler than that. People expect a public system to plan responsibly and follow through on what it said it was going to do. When that doesn’t happen—and the solution ends up being something much more disruptive—it’s fair to question it.

“You live in a society” doesn’t really answer that.  Of course decisions are collective and resources are shared. But that doesn’t mean every decision is automatically the right one, or that communities shouldn’t push back when something doesn’t make sense to them.

At the end of the day, this isn’t about wanting more than anyone else. It’s about expecting consistency and reasonable planning from the system everyone is paying into.[/quote]

Exactly! Which is why the same people who are bashing Wootton are going to be screaming when their school gets closed in the next round. If it happens to Wootton and you didn’t care, don’t be crying when it happens to you.[/quote]

This isn’t really about “wait until it happens to you.”  It’s about recognizing that decisions like this set a precedent. If a school can be relocated after years of renovation being deferred, with limited options presented late in the process, that’s a model that can be applied elsewhere.[/quote]

I would hope so. Getting a new building is a good outcome for most. You're just salty your kids school will say Gaithersburg, kind of hard to humble drop Potomac when you kids go to school in North North North Potomac [/quote]

Getting a new building several miles away in a high traffic area was never the plan—people asked for Wootton to be renovated where it is.

This only became about relocation after MCPS deferred renovation multiple times and created a situation where moving the school now solves its own poor planning problems.  That may be convenient for MCPS, but it comes at the cost of disrupting an entire established community.

Reducing it to “people just don’t like the label” completely misses that point.[/quote]

It’s a reasonable solution.  Lots of kids commute several mikes away.  Should we not bus any kids and build more neighborhood schools by your logic?  Who pays for that. The school was deferred because other schools needed it more.  You lobbied for a solution and got one.

Most of the community is fine with Crown.  [/quote]

It’s not really about whether kids can or can’t commute a few miles—of course they do all over the county. The question is whether relocating an entire established school is the best solution [b]compared to other options that were originally on the table.[/b]

No one is arguing against shared resources or against prioritization across the CIP. The concern is that Wootton was repeatedly deferred, and then relocation becomes the “solution” that also conveniently resolves a separate capacity issue.

And on “you lobbied for a solution and got one”—that’s exactly the disagreement.  People asked for renovation at Wootton. What’s been decided now is not that request being fulfilled in a delayed way, but a fundamentally different decision that comes with much larger community disruption.

As for support in the community, there are clearly a range of views—but disagreement isn’t the same as opposition to Crown itself. The issue for many isn’t the building, it’s the decision to relocate an existing school to fill it.[/quote]

Sure, but unless you invented a time machine, we're at the place we are now. The Parkway building is in bad shape, the Crown building is brand new and located within the existing Wootton boundary and enrollment doesn't support opening Crown as a new high school. The decision they came up with to move Wootton seems reasonable.

I can understand having complaints about how this all happened, but it was caused by a series of decisions made by people who aren't around anymore. Taylor wasn't superintendent when the decision to build Crown was made nor the boundary study started. A lot of the current BoE wasn't around either.

There is another boundary study starting up, there's a lot of BoE and County Council seats up for grabs, so the next study is the one where everyone's voice can have the most impact.[/quote]

If relocation was truly the only workable solution, it’s fair to ask why it wasn’t the starting point instead of something introduced late as Option H.  Why roll out such a major change at the last stage and right before the holidays if it was always the clear answer?[/quote]

It is fair to ask, and I agree that the entire process was a tad chaotic.

The answer is probably going to be unsatisfying, which is that they didn't get complete up-to-date enrollment projections until October / November 2025, which showed an actual drop in enrollment. MCPS also prepared the CIP request around the same time period, which gave MCPS a better idea of the facility needs and planning.

So, new superintendent, getting a fresh look at the needs of the county and being surprised at what he found is probably why it wasn't included in the initial 2 option rounds. It took a fresh set of eyes for someone to question "Do we really need to open another high school if enrollment is dropping?"

Again, complaints about how the process went is fair and MCPS had a couple slides in the last presentation where they addressed the concerns and promised to do better in the next boundary study. Wootton itself has one of the weaker arguments for being treated unfairly compared to other schools like Wheaton, where a community was moved out of the walk zone, or Brown Station, where they didn't get moved until after the superintendent's recommendation went out. There's also Magruder, which has the same facility concerns as Wootton, but is not being moved to a new school because Wootton makes more geographic sense to move to the Crown site (also Magruder wasn't part of the boundary study).

For me, the end result (regardless of process) for Wootton seems the best solution out of a bad situation. Additionally, despite my issues with the entire process, it seems legal, given how weak the filing from Save Wootton is.[/quote]

The filing is just the beginning for Wootton. MCPS will have the opportunity to make a smarter decision at every turn. The more they double down, the worse the legal fight will become for them.

Also legality isn’t simply determined by the outcome. The process matters just as much even if you think the end result is “right.”
 [/quote]

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