Schools Archives - Vote For Neil

05 Feb

Board of Education Six-Year School Construction Plan includes funding and planning for Gaithersburg

An amendment to the Capital Improvements Plan directs Montgomery County Public Schools officials to form a roundtable group to start planning for the new high school on the Crown Farms property in Gaithersburg. Board member Rebecca Smondrowski said the group should include representatives from the Gaithersburg, Richard Montgomery, Quince Orchard and Thomas S. Wootton clusters. The program includes about $136 million in project funding for a new high school in Gaithersburg.

Smondrowski also proposed instructing MCPS to work with representatives from the Quince Orchard Cluster on growth management planning and to collaborate with the city of Gaithersburg to identify future elementary school sites. Board members agreed to include the suggestion in the capital plan.

Thanks for all the advocacy, Rebecca Keller Smondrowski!

Link to more information: http://www.bethesdamagazine.com/Bethesda-Beat/2017/Board-of-Education-Gives-Unanimous-Support-to-Six-Year-School-Construction-Plan/

03 Feb

MCPS Site Selection Committee recommended Kelley Park for new elementary school

Next steps are input from the City and from the public, followed by the Board of Education’s endorsement/comments.

MCPS has not made the final determination about the site — this is the committee’s recommendation. If you click the link in the post above, you can read the report and see why they are looking for a school site and which other sites were evaluated.

If Kelley is the site, then the actual configuration would have to be determined — a school would take up part of the park, not all of it. Based on the first diagram that was shared, the two baseball diamonds and part of the softball field would remain as a city park. One option would take away the softball field and replace it with something smaller, perhaps a soccer field.

The full report from the committee is at this link: http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/departments/facilities/rem/Cluster_Report_Gaithersburg.pdf

31 Jan

U-turns at Quince Orchard HS

The Maryland Department of Transportation has agreed that the morning traffic situation at Quince Orchard High School is an issue that needs remediation. As you can see in the attached letter, MDOT will eliminate morning u-turns at the Copen Meadow intersection.

Additional suggestions were made at this month’s Gaithersburg Transportation Committee meeting and have been presented to QOHS. We will continue to work on improving safety and keep you posted as solutions are implemented.

04 Jan

New Schools News

A new elementary school near Olde Towne Gaithersburg? The selection committee has narrowed the list to two finalists, reports Gaithersburg City Manager Tony Tomasello.

Plans for another potential new school across town near Kentlands will be the subject of a year-long process. We at the City have suggested 4 possibilities to be on the list for MCPS’s consideration.

A new high school in Crown Farm is already in the MCPS capital improvements plan.

Speaking of our schools, here is the list of School Grant Awards for this year:

Brown Station: $4,565 for Mustang Academy, Artist League, PAX Leaders, and Piano Pals

Fields Road: $2,904 for Math Masters and ESOL Club

Forest Oak: $3,000 for Man II Man

Gaithersburg ES: $9,350 for Chromebooks for Primary, Piano Pals, and Intergenerational Mentoring

Gaithersburg HS: $2,624 for Algebra II Summer Prep. Camp

Gaithersburg MS: $3,000 for Achievement Through Music

Jones Lane: $1,120 for ESOL & Academic Support Homework Club

Lakelands Park: $3,456 for Homework Club

Quince Orchard: $1,500 for Minority Scholars Program

Rosemont: $3,793 for Girls on the Run and STEM-R

St. Martin of Tours: $5,380 for Amazing Afternoons and Skills Builders

Strawberry Knoll: $1,800 for ESOL Homework Club

Summit Hall: $6,170 for Saturday School at GHS, Summit Hall After School Karate Program, and Big Learning Science & Engineering

Washington Grove: $1,272 for Baskets for Babies

25 Jul

MCPS Planning Discussions

On Friday, we had another meeting with MCPS, this one with planning staff and their consultants. We talked about the need for school capacity.

In our city, we go through stages of project approvals for new housing – the master plan, sketch plan, schematic design plan (SDP), and permitting. It’s only at the last phase when a project is considered funded and eligible for MCPS to consider school capacity issues. But by then it’s really too late – people start moving in within a couple of years, but MCPS takes 6 years or more to provide capacity.

It would be best if we could get on the MCPS list as early as possible, probably at the sketch plan stage. It’s hard to approve more housing if we don’t know if there will be room in the local schools. A true chicken-and-egg problem.

We discussed some creative approaches. For example, there are new housing developments moving through the stages for the Kentlands commercial district. We suggested potential sites for a new school close by.

MCPS planning pushed back, saying that it is more efficient to build additions to small schools like Dufief, where 350 students could be accommodated in a bigger school, rather than a new school for 750 where there are not enough students to fill it up yet.

The openness for discussions and for creativity is healthy, but there are challenges caused by the slow timetables at MCPS and the quicker ones here in Gaithersburg.

Toward the end of the discussion, I raised the issue of the deep deficit in classroom space in the system. By my math, MCPS needs to spend $500 million just to get kids out of portables and to handle the growth already known, plus perhaps another $500 in deferred maintenance. The MCPS staff said that they thought the deferred maintenance number was more like $2 billion.

It’s clear that MCPS is in a huge capital deficit, and we need to make sure our state and county officials recognize how important it is to fix. When you are in a hole, the first thing to do is: stop digging!

10 Aug

Gaithersburg APFO Discussion

Great work session this evening on the Gaithersburg APFO (Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance). The direction given to staff was:

– Instead of putting a school’s district into moratorium, institute a school construction fee that would help MCPS with its school funding. The fee is proposed to be identical to the County’s fee (not currently collected inside Gaithersburg).

– The moratorium limit would be raised to 150% of MCPS capacity. There is some discussion over whether that number is too high or even if there should be a moratorium number — according to one of our Planning Board members, the state’s guidelines for APFOs do not allow them to trigger automatic moratoriums.

– There may be some cases where the capacity constraint would be waived. This list is under ongoing discussion.

Ryan Spiegel and I ran some numbers during the session, and at about $5000 per housing unit (a rough average for town homes and apartments), the Kentlands Blvd. master plan would generate $11.5 million, going a long way toward covering the cost of an elementary school. The developers we spoke with have no issue with the fee as long as they can be sure they won’t run into a moratorium after making plans.

The bottom line is, making new development possible seems to be the key trigger for MCPS to add capacity in its Capital Improvement Plans, so we’re moving in a positive direction with this new thinking on the APFO. And, adding a source of new funding to partially offset the capital cost should also help.

The record remains open on this discussion until September 11, and discussions are ongoing including the Planning Commission meeting on September 2 and the Mayor & Council meeting on September 21.

The packet from this evening’s meeting is available at the link below, and the video is here: http://video2.siretech.net/…/Mayor%20and%20Ci…/2355/2355.mp4

07 Jul

Improving Our APFO

We are in the process of re-evaluating Gaithersburg’s Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance (APFO) with respect to school crowding. Proposed changes would provide funding to build new school capacity.

The city’s APFO was originally adopted in 2007 and modified in 2012. The County and the City of Rockville have adopted similar ordinances. The objective is to ensure that development does not exceed the capacity of our schools, roads, and other infrastructure. Exceeding the capacity of resources can result in a moratorium on new development that would worsen the issue.

However, it has become clear that new development is not the sole cause of overcapacity. Some communities with good schools have found that enrollment continues to rise as houses are sold, with more families with young children moving in than families whose children “age out” of those schools. The APFO may reduce the issue, but it does not appear to solve it. Even worse, by blocking development, the planners at MCPS do not provide for new capacity in the MCPS capital improvement plan (CIP).

Before there was an APFO, the danger was that development would move faster than MCPS could construct schools. This seemed sensible at the time, but as we have seen it has not solved the issue. Without new school construction, the issue keeps getting worse.

Last night, the Mayor, City Council, and the Planning Commission held a joint public hearing to review changes to the program developed by the Planning Department staff under direction from the elected officials.

The proposals in development for a revised APFO for Gaithersburg would require developers to pay a special fee for developments that would increase usage of over-capacity schools. That fee would be calculated to cover the cost of new classroom construction and would be earmarked specifically to relieve congestion in the affected school. The fee would be turned over by the city to MCPS when school construction is approved.

Short of the state government suddenly finding itself in a position to provide the funding necessary to build the schools we need in the county – which could literally run more than a billion dollars, just to catch up to current capacity needs – the revised Gaithersburg APFO would permit new development as long as the development itself funds the new schoolrooms that are needed.

MCPS is still going to need to chip in, which means that the county and state are going to need to find additional funding, since existing homes that turn over are contributing to the issues and there is no clear source of funding there. But the new APFO that is being discussed should go a long way to providing the relief we need.

The presentation on the proposed APFO changes can be found here: http://sirepub.gaithersburgmd.gov/…/4553207072015045532482.…

And more details are here: http://sirepub.gaithersburgmd.gov/…/4553307072015045733500.…

You can view the video of the Joint Work Session here (beginning at 1:26): http://video2.siretech.net/…/Mayor%20and%20Ci…/2350/2350.mp4