Three members of the Montgomery County Council and planning board Chairman Casey Anderson sent a letter Monday to interim Schools Superintendent Larry Bowers requesting options to address school overcrowding.
The letter comes as the Planning Board reviews master plan drafts for the Westbard neighborhood and downtown Bethesda. The plans will guide development over the next 20 to 30 years in the areas and are likely to permit thousands of new residences.
The potential population growth has led to concerns from residents about what will happen at already overcrowded schools in the Bethesda-Chevy Chase, Walt Whitman and Walter Johnson clusters.
The school system has proposed reopening closed schools, redistricting or pairing schools to deal with future enrollment growth. The letter sent Monday notes that a combination of these options “is likely necessary to address the county’s anticipated school needs.”
In order to help their planning process, Anderson and the three council members—George Leventhal, Roger Berliner and Craig Rice—requested information about possible options to address school growth over a longer period than can be addressed in the school system’s six-year capital budget requests.
Typically, the council reviews school renovation or construction requests as part of the capital budget review process. During that review, the council can weigh how much money to budget for projects after examining each cluster’s projected enrollment growth. However, given the master plan review process scheduled for next year, council members are seeking additional information about options in order to better address residents’ concerns as the council and planning board weigh decisions that will set height and density limits for new buildings in Bethesda.
“These options for medium-to-long term school capacity are especially important in the Walter Johnson, Whitman, and Bethesda-Chevy Chase clusters, where redevelopment interest is strong and land is scarce,” the letter reads.
Developers are proposing 328 new homes on the site of the WMAL radio towers, multiple new apartment buildings are under construction in downtown Bethesda and the Westbard area could see as many as 2,000 new apartments permitted under the updated master plan for the west Bethesda neighborhood.
Leventhal said Monday the letter is about obtaining information the officials can use for long-range planning.
“We want more detail than the six-year capital plan offers,” Leventhal said. “We hope to get a thorough and thoughtful response before we take up sector plans that affect those parts of the county.”
Leventhal added that the letter is also part of an effort to reassure residents that the school system has capacity to address population growth. He said one of the more significant options available to MCPS is to reopen schools at sites that are not currently being used or are being leased to other entities.
School officials provided a chart to the Montgomery County Board of Education in September that included a number of closed school sites in Bethesda—most of which are being leased by private schools or used for office space.
“It’s our understanding that there are quite a few properties owned by the school system that are not in use now as schools and we’d like the school system to give us some indication of what properties it sees as available for school purposes,” Leventhal said.
