After community feedback over a request for proposals to review Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) boundaries, Superintendent Thomas Taylor announced Tuesday the bid deadline has been extended to the end of October.
“We’ve taken that public comment into consideration at the board’s direction,” Taylor said during Tuesday’s school board meeting. “We recently extended this bid response period to allow for more opportunity for respondents to submit proposals … this is definitely in response to us being transparent with the community and sharing more information about this process.”
On Sept. 9, MCPS released a request for proposal (RFP) indicating the district was seeking bids from consultants to conduct a school boundary review. The bid deadline originally scheduled for Oct. 9 was pushed back to Oct. 22 and now to Oct. 31, according to documents on the MCPS procurement website. Local blog Montgomery Perspective first reported the details about the RFP.
Analyses of boundaries have divided the MCPS community in the past. In 2019, MCPS conducted a countywide boundary analysis. While district leaders said at the time the review wouldn’t result in changes, the analysis sparked debate over the value of school diversity versus students attending schools close to their homes. Hundreds of residents attended forums and community feedback meetings on the topic, with one forum resulting in jeers and yelling from attendees.
The 2019 request only received two proposals from companies interested in the project, prompting the board to delay awarding a contract at that time to “further vet proposals.”
In a virtual townhall with the Bethesda Chevy Chase Democratic Breakfast Club on Oct. 15, Taylor said MCPS was evaluating the boundaries for two new high schools that will be opening, which will create a “very significant disruption to our boundaries for high school and will create a lot of dominoes.”
New buildings for Rockville’s Charles W. Woodward and Gaithersburg’s Crown high schools, as well as an expansion of Damascus High School, are scheduled to be completed by August 2027. Northwood High School students are currently using the Woodward building on Old Georgetown Road, which is still under construction, as a holding facility while the Northwood building in Silver Spring is rebuilt.
The review timeline
According to the documents included in the RFP, the review is expected to determine the service area of all three high schools. The proposal includes 19 of the 25 high schools in MCPS and 31 middle schools.
The RFP also includes the following implementation timeline:
- Project orientation and projection consultation: November to December 2024;
- Development of engagement process model: December 2024;
- Data collection, validation and option development: Late November 2024 to January 2025;
- Community engagement: January to October 2025;
- Boundary study report released: No later than Jan. 15, 2026;
- Superintendent recommendation released: No later than Feb. 1, 2026;
- Board of Education hearings and work sessions: February to March 2026; and
- Boundaries adopted: March 2026.
In documents requesting that the bid deadline be extended, Angela McIntosh-Davis, MCPS director of the Division of Procurement, wrote the review is for “the magnitude of potential changes that need to occur so that schools that are crowded have relief by the new attendance zones, and schools with space are utilized more fully.”
At Tuesday afternoon’s school board meeting, Taylor said the board doesn’t typically discuss items not included on its agenda but that the district “made a commitment to sharing information about our boundary study.”
Montgomery County Council of PTAs President Brigid Howe shared the group’s concerns about the proposed review at the school board’s Sept. 26 meeting, particularly concerning the timeline, proposed community engagement and information provided to MCPS families.
Howe said the MCCPTA was concerned the timeline listed in the RFP only includes one phase specifically for community engagement “and that phase is already mid-way through the process.” Howe also advocated for more information on the process to be made available for the MCPS community, saying the review project demands transparency.
“We believe that community engagement should be prioritized in all phases,” Howe said in her testimony.
In response to Howe’s testimony, board member Rebecca Smondrowski said that starting conversations early and reassuring families have been helpful to the board in past boundary studies.
In a text to MoCo360, Howe said she hoped the purpose of extending the RFP deadline is to ensure the district receives responses from a variety of vendors.
“However, I have concerns that this will further compress the timeline as described in the RFP, which as I testified, was tight in parts,” Howe said. “This process has a hard stop as the two new high schools must open in August 2027 — we need to ensure that this is done right.”
MCPS spokesperson Liliana Lopez said Wednesday the end date of the review can’t be changed because the district will need to know how to populate the two schools.
