A two-story addition planned at a Silver Spring elementary school should include ways to increase student pedestrian safety, the county Planning Board has advised.
The county school system is pursuing an expansion at Pine Crest Elementary School to relieve crowding for the 465-student school, which is about 60 students above its capacity and uses five temporary classrooms.
The Planning Board last week came out with a list of suggestions for the project, including improving safety in areas where vehicles enter the property, reducing the width of student drop-off areas to 20 feet and incorporating curb design to slow vehicle turning speeds across student walkways.
The proposed addition is on the north side of the Woodmoor Drive building and would include four classrooms, a multipurpose room and music room on the first floor. There would be another four classrooms on the second floor to increase the school’s maximum capacity from 404 students to 588 students.
Enrollment at Pine Crest, which includes third through fifth grades, is expected to increase slightly from 465 students to 471 students in the 2023-2024 school year.
Another project at the nearby Montgomery Knolls Elementary School calls for the addition of six traditional classrooms, testing rooms, storage space and other specialized classrooms. The addition will be two stories with about 8,780 square feet of new space, according to project documents.
With the two projects, the schools will have a 1,269 student capacity in 2023, with a projected enrollment of 1,001 children.
Of the school district’s 206 schools, 21 are at more than 120 percent capacity, according to school district data. Nine are in moratorium status and the rest have avoided residential development delays with proposed projects or pending student reassignments to other schools.
When considering whether a planning area should be in a building moratorium, Pine Crest and Montgomery Knolls elementary schools’ enrollment are reviewed together, and the school district has also approved preliminary plans for an addition at Montgomery Knolls, currently about 30 students under capacity.
