The Montgomery County school district will pay nearly $58,000 to lease each temporary classroom it uses for the next five years, an increase of about $8,000 per unit from the current contract.
This school year, nearly 10,000 students attend class in 434 relocatable classrooms across the county, according to the MCPS capital improvement plan. That number does not include relocatable classrooms used for day care, to stage construction on site at schools or those at holding facilities.
Relocatable classrooms, often called portables, are primarily used when schools become too crowded to fit all of the enrolled students. The portables are single classrooms placed on the school property, often on play fields or parking lots, and can be moved from school to school each year depending on enrollment fluctuations.
Last week, the school board voted to award a new five-year lease contract to Modular Genius Inc., based in Joppa, Md. Under the new contract, MCPS will pay $57,680 to use each relocatable classroom for five years.
If the number of portables remained steady, they would cost more than $25 million over the five-year period, but the school district anticipates the number will grow.
“The number of relocatable classrooms declined between 2005 and 2008 as enrollment plateaued and capacity projects opened,” the CIP says. “However, with enrollment increasing again, the number of relocatable classrooms is expected to increase in the future.”
Sometimes, schools with space use portables to meet target student-to-teacher ratios if the building doesn’t have enough rooms, according to the CIP.
There were seven other bidders, ranging from $60,000 to $131,000 for each temporary classroom.
The lease contract was part of the school board’s consent agenda, and there was no discussion about the contract.
The school board’s resolution says “the final quantity of relocatable classrooms will be determined at a later date when the student enrollment projections and staff allocations are completed” for the next school year.
