The Board of Education for the first time on Tuesday discussed a controversial proposal to collocate a North Bethesda middle school with a special education program.
The Board members who asked questions gave few indications of their level of support for Interim Superintendent Larry Bower’s recommendation to collocate the Rock Terrace School with the future Tilden Middle School in the Luxmanor neighborhood.
While some wanted to know why more community members weren’t involved in the initial planning process, others spoke highly of the potential for general education and special needs students to be at the same site and occasionally interact in certain classes and programs.
MCPS senior planner Deborah Szyfer countered some of the concerns about the collocation during a presentation to the Board.
Some in the neighborhood around the future school site on Tilden Lane have expressed concerns about road capacity for buses and fencing that would be needed to make sure some special needs students in the Rock Terrace program don’t leave school grounds.
Others with children who will attend the future Tilden Middle School are concerned about middle school-aged kids mixing with Rock Terrace’s older students, some who are 18-20.
Szyfer said the number of additional buses needed to service the estimated additional 100 Rock Terrace students would be negligible. A formal traffic impact analysis and other environmental studies would be done during a feasibility planning period if the Board approves the proposal.
That could come during a Board hearing on Tuesday, May 12. A public hearing on the proposal is set for Monday, April 27 at 7 p.m.
The older special education students wouldn’t come into contact with the middle school students and many older Rock Terrace students take part in job programs during the school day.
School officials have also pointed to nearby Walter Johnson High School as providing a chance for the older Rock Terrace students to take part in long-running programs mixing special needs and general education students.
Board member Phil Kauffman asked why upcoming high school projects weren’t considered for the collocation. Bowers said in his recommendation that the Tilden project provides the best and closest construction project in terms of a start date to get Rock Terrace students out of their aging building in Rockville.
Szyfer told the Board the school, scheduled to start construction in August 2019, will likely break ground in August 2020 based on the current outlook for capital budget funding.
It would be built on a roughly 20-acre site for roughly 1,200 general education students. The building on the site now would be revitalized and expanded. It now serves as a holding school, though it was Tilden Middle School until 1991.
A March public meeting about attracted nearly 80 people from the neighborhood, many who were surprised the collocation idea had already been discussed by a roundtable group of school staff and parents.
Board member Michael Durso asked Szyfer if MCPS should’ve considered including community and civic group representatives in the roundtable process.
“I hope we would consider that it might appear to some that they’re being shut out although that may not be the intent,” Durso said.
Szyfer said the roundtable process followed school system standards and that it was meant for the principals and staff of each school to identify big-picture issues that could pop up should the schools be collocated.
Image via MCPS
