MCPS, school board relocate headquarters to spiffy, new digs in Rockville

Move to allow historic Carver building to undergo repairs, transform into community, educational space

May 20, 2024 9:59 p.m.

After decades of meeting in an aging former school, Montgomery County Public Schools and the school board have moved into a modern office building — at 15 W. Gude Drive in Rockville –complete with a board meeting room with fresh blue paint, a new sleek dais for members, rows of grey plastic chairs and six flat-screen TVs.

The move is part of the district’s efforts to modernize its processes, facilitate community engagement, consolidate the school system into one office complex, and follow through with repairs to the former MCPS headquarters at the historic Carver Educational Services Center building at 350 Hungerford Drive, according to school officials.

In addition to dealing with aging facilities at Carver, which opened in 1951 as the first and only high school for Black students in the county, district officials were hearing complaints from the community about the building and the limited capacity of the boardroom, school board Chief of Staff Lori-Christina Webb told MoCo360.

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“We were getting more and more complaints about people not being able to get into the board room, or how uncomfortable the hearing space was,” Webb said. “…There were just a lot of concerns about how well democracy could function in that space.”

With the move, now all MCPS operations will be headquartered in a two-building office complex.

The neighboring building, 45 W. Gude Drive, was already home to “a good portion of [MCPS] operations,” such as the employee and retiree service center, division of financial services and office of facilities management, according to Seth Adams, associate superintendent of facilities management.

Adams said MCPS started the process of moving from the Carver building to the 15 W. Gude Drive location in 2019. After the COVID-19 pandemic caused a spike in office vacancies across the county, the district took advantage of “very favorable times” to lease the space, he said.

Board President Karla Silvestre said she was excited for the public to see and use the new space.

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“It’s good to be in a more modern facility where everything works and the public can all fit and hear the meetings and that we can also clear out Carver so it can get the attention it needs as well,” she said.

When the Carver building opened, it was known as George Washington Carver High School and Junior College in racially segregated Montgomery County, according to MCPS. At the time it was also the first Black high school that was “built to standards on par with white schools in the county,” according to MCPS. In 2003, the school was designated a historic site in Rockville.

After years of heating and air conditioning issues and water leaks at the Carver building, Webb said district officials decided that making repairs to the building while staff worked there would be disruptive. So, they decided it would be easier to make the big move to a new site to allow for the repairs and the building to be used in a new way.

According to Adams, MCPS is paying a monthly rent of $49,153 for first-floor space that houses the school board meeting room, offices and administrative functions and the district’s security office.

The new boardroom can accommodate more meeting attendees, allowing for 150 audience members and a capacity of more than 200 people, Adams said. In addition, the seating in the room is flexible and can accommodate different events and functions.

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“We’re excited to welcome more families, more constituents, more students. And I think it’s going to be a great experience for everyone to be able to participate in these meetings much more efficiently than what we’ve been doing,” Adams said.

For Webb, the new, more modern space “speaks to the seriousness of the work” that the school board does.

“It was a space that was designed with the idea of how do we best facilitate engagement and people feeling welcome and comfortable to testify, to come to hearings, to just come and sit and listen to a board meeting?” Webb said.

Now MCPS will be able to make repairs to the Carver building and eventually transform the building, which the district has reimagined as a welcome center and community center, Adams said.

“What we know is office functions in enclosed school buildings just doesn’t lend itself to the most efficient use,” Adams said. “And so, as we see the need for more pre-K, more special ed, more educational functions, we’re really being strategic about how we use our closed school buildings for those educational purposes.”

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