Reply to Why isn't MCPS redistricting Rachel Carlson

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have wondered this as well - when we bought two years ago we looked at homes in the RC area.  I wonder if any RC parents would be willing to send their kids to Fields Road (for example).   Most buy wanting to their kids to go to RC.

This is what the long range planning document currently says:

" Projections indicate that
enrollment at Rachel Carson Elementary School
will exceed capacity by 92 seats or more by
the end of the six-year period. Enrollment will
continue to be monitored to determine whether
it is necessary to develop plans to relieve the
overutilization at Rachel Carson Elementary School in the future."

It SHOCKS me that MCPS does not have more of a plan than this....[/quote]

This seems to be par for the course for MCPS.  The Westbard sector in Bethesda is being evaluated for redevelopment, and a large chunk of the area to be redeveloped is zoned for Wood Acres.  Wood Acres' current capacity is 550, and the school's current enrollment is 789, or 143% of capacity.  WAES will start an 18-month expansion this winter, after which the school's capacity will be 734.  Still overcrowded on day one of the expanded building.  http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/regulatoryaccountability/glance/currentyear/schools/02417.pdf

The briefing book for the proposed amended sector plan notes that Pyle MS enrollment "will exceed capacity by up to 150 seats throughout the six-year CIP planning period. There are no plans to add capacity to the school.  Enrollment at Walt Whitman High School student [sic] is projected to exceed capacity by more than 200 seats by the end of the six-year projection period.  An FY 2014 appropriation was approved for facility planning funds for a feasibility study to determine the cost and scope of an addition.  A request for CIP finding of an addition is anticipated in the future."

The planning commission and the developers have made it clear that redevelopment in the Westbard sector (which is necessary...it's pretty run down) will only happen if they can earn enough profit from housing developments.  So they want density to be as high as the community can bear.  At a meeting last night, Bruce Crispell, MCPS's Director of Long Range Planning, said that MCPS will adopt a wait and see approach -- rather than do studies now to figure out where additional students from the redeveloped area would go, MCPS will wait to see what the developers plan for, wait to see if Wood Acres (which they admit can't be expanded any farther) becomes grossly overcrowded again, and by how much, and THEN -- and only then -- will they start doing studies to plan for a solution.

A conservative estimate for the number of new housing units would be about 1,500-2,000.  Assuming VERY conservatively that only 10% of those new units would be occupied by families, and each family has 1.5 school-age kids, we are talking at least 225-300 new students entering the already-overcrowded schools that Westbard feeds into.  In reality, this number will be higher -- and this would be on top of the growth in enrollment already being experienced.

Wood Acres is overcrowded already.  Pyle and Whitman are too.  But MCPS has no intention of pushing the developers to be part of a solution before they finalize their building plans.  Nor is there any plan to do any modeling or planning concurrently with the redevelopment process.  Rather, Crispell will wait to see how bad it gets before acting.  At that point, of course, it is too late to involve the developers in a solution.  Instead, he suggested that schools near Wood Acres could possibly be expanded, and then children would be redistricted here and there to even things out.  But how long will that take?  Someone at the meeting asked Crispell about why Rachel Carson wasn't being redistricted, and he pretty much dodged the question.  So I don't have a lot of confidence in MCPS's handling of any of these issues.

To be clear, I think Westbard is long overdue for redevelopment, and I am not against the development of more affordable housing options.  But this can't be done without adequate preparation and consideration for the existing infrastructure (traffic and school capacity).  MCPS's current approach is an abdication of responsibility.[/quote]

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