About 30 minutes before the end of classes Wednesday at Northwood High School in Silver Spring, hundreds of students gathered on the front lawn carrying posters and banners and yelling, “Fund our school! Fund our school!”
The students were protesting the Montgomery County Board of Education’s recent decision to delay construction of an auditorium at the new Charles W. Woodward High School in Rockville, where Northwood students are expected to move next fall while their own school is rebuilt to increase capacity.
Students and parents say the school district’s decisions regarding the move—including plans to start the school day 20 minutes earlier–have not been made in collaboration with the Northwood community, leading to frustration and mounting concerns about the impending lack of facilities for students.
During the walkout, students held a banner stating “Northwood students deserve better!” and handmade posters with slogans including “Give us proper resources,” “Incomplete school, incomplete future,” and “Our ‘WHY’ needs an auditorium.” Drivers passing the school on University Boulevard honked their horns in support.
Meanwhile, about an hour before the walkout began, Montgomery County Public Schools sent a letter to the Northwood community outlining efforts to address concerns about the school start time and funding for the auditorium construction.
Northwood students are expected to move to Woodward High School, under construction at 11211 Old Georgetown Road, for three years while their school undergoes the $124 million rebuilding project. In March, the school board approved project changes that would postpone the construction of auditoriums at Woodward and the new Crown High School under construction in Gaithersburg. Officials have not said when they plan for the auditoriums to be completed, noting that “budgetary shortfalls” were the reason for the delay.
Members of Northwood’s student government association and its Academy of Music, Theatre and Dance organized Wednesday’s walkout after learning that they would spend three years at Woodward without an auditorium and two years without sports fields. The district’s current plan for Northwood’s fall sports season includes busing student-athletes to nearby parks and fields for practice and other schools for games.
The students also are concerned that they would need to wake up earlier to get to school by the proposed 7:25 a.m. start time. County high schools currently start the school day at 7:45 a.m.

Northwood senior Khadija Ndiaye said students sought to raise awareness about the impact of the delay in building an auditorium and sports fields. The students also are looking for community support in urging the County Council to provide funding for the auditorium as part of the MCPS budget for its fiscal year 2025-2030 Capital Improvements Program (CIP).
“We are out here because we’re fighting for our school. Even though we’re not going to be here [next school year] our friends are here and the Gladiators that come after us have every right to the same opportunities and space to create and perform and express themselves as we do,” Ndiaye said, referring to the school’s sports team mascot.
Without an auditorium, which MCPS officials have said was never included in the original plans for Northwood’s arrival at Woodward, the district is looking at alternative ways to support performing arts students. In the newly built Woodward building, there will be various smaller performance spaces and a black box theater that can hold around 135 attendees, MCPS officials have said.
Quin McMenamin, a senior whose sibling will be attending Northwood next school year, says that having a black box theater “just is not going to cut it for all the stuff that we do.”
“Our dance program and theater program are just top-notch,” McMenamin said. “I think it’s a waste not to give [students] an auditorium to do all that amazing stuff.”
McMenamin also said that starting school 20 minutes earlier would be a “huge mistake.”
“Teenage sleep schedules are just not conducive to early starts,” he said. “You can look at research on sleep and how the circadian rhythm of teenagers works is most of us can’t fall asleep until after 11 [p.m.] and then need at least 10 hours of sleep,” he said.
Freshman Sidney Walter said she’d been counting on having an auditorium when she moves to Woodward. “My safe space this year has been the auditorium and so it’s very heartbreaking,” she said.
When completed, the new Woodward will consist of a building of up to four stories tall with an interior courtyard, athletic fields, a track, a stadium and eventually an auditorium. The project aims to alleviate overcrowding at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda as well as other schools. The capacity of the school is set at 2,160 students.
Initial MCPS plans intended for Woodward to be a holding school for two years for the Northwood students. But in November, MCPS announced that the students would need to stay an extra year due to the district’s low confidence that the new Northwood building would be completed in a two-year window. Subsequently, Woodward’s official reopening was pushed back to August 2027.
Plans to rebuild Northwood aim to alleviate crowding in nearby high schools and provide an upgrade to a school that was originally built in 1956, with additions completed in 1958, 1964 and 1974, according to the MCPS project website.
The project entails demolishing the existing school and rebuilding it on the same site. The new four-story school will be situated around a courtyard and will include about 400,000 square feet of new space. The school will have a new athletic stadium, baseball and softball fields and tennis courts as well as a performing arts center, TV studio, labs and dozens of classrooms.
Northwood cluster parent Brigid Howe, who watched the student walkout from the sidewalk along University Boulevard, said she wanted to show that parents support the students and “recognize that Northwood is being asked to sacrifice a lot of the next three years.”
MCPS responded to the Northwood community’s concerns with the letter to students and families to say that “they were able to go back to the drawing board” on plans for the move to Woodward, she said.
MCPS spokesperson Chris Cram did not comment on the student walkout.
The email letter from MCPS Chief Operating Officer Brian Hull to the Northwood community shared updates on the plans for the move, including:
- Changing proposed bus pick-up times to include an average pickup time of 6:42 a.m. The earliest pick-up time may be at 6:27 a.m. as opposed to the initial proposal of 6:05 a.m.
- Starting first-period classes at 7:40 a.m. The Woodward building will be open and accessible to students by 6:30 a.m.
- Providing enough paved parking to meet the school’s needs.
In addition, Hull said the district “remains committed” to find ways to adjust the plan for building an auditorium. “We will explore innovative ways to bring enough capital funding to the project, allowing us to include an auditorium as early as 2026,” Hull wrote.
Howe said the updates count as a “win” for Northwood families. The changes are “just an example of the collaboration that MCPS needs to be doing with [Northwood’s] communities,” she said.