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!