A group of Aspen Hill residents is fighting a plan to relocate Montgomery County’s alternative-education programs to their neighborhood, saying the proposal would disrupt a quiet community, needlessly demolish a school building and waste taxpayer money.

The group has written letters, created a petition and filed an appeal this month with the Maryland State Board of Education, arguing that the county school board’s decision on the project was arbitrary and unreasonable.

“We are concerned about the safety and tranquility of the neighborhood,” said Jamison Adcock, vice president of the Aspen Hill Civic Association and a leader of the effort, citing community worries about traffic and potential crime and objecting to the nature of the decision-making. “This has not been a transparent process.”

Montgomery Schools Superintendent Joshua P. Starr announced the proposed relocation of the district’s alternative programs in late October, when he presented it as part of a series of amendments to the school system’s six-year capital improvement plan.

The relocation would move the alternative-education programs at the Blair G. Ewing Center on Avery Road in Rockville to the site of the former English Manor Elementary School on Bestor Drive in Aspen Hill.

School officials said that the English Manor building, which would be renovated and expanded with $16.6 million in previously approved funding, is better suited to the programs and that such a move would clear the way for using the 22.5-acre Ewing site as a depot for county school buses. The school system must vacate its Shady Grove transportation depot by January 2017 due to a county redevelopment plan.

At a school board meeting last month, Starr said the project would allow the district to take an existing school site and “turn it into the kind of instructional site that we believe our kids in the alternative programs deserve.”

Opponents questioned the project when Montgomery is grappling with an enrollment surge and overcrowded schools. “The school board is demanding more money for school construction, and they are getting ready to demolish a school,” Adcock said.

The five-page appeal to the state school board, filed by Adcock and Jessica and David Rowden, said the district describes its alternative-education programs as serving students with behavioral or attendance problems, as well as students who have been involved with controlled substances, serious injury or weapons.

It contends that police were called for 47 incidents at Ewing during a recent school year, while at Rockville High School, with nearly six times the enrollment, school officials sought police intervention for 29 incidents during the same period.

David Rowden said that his group does not intend to disparage the students and that it believes they are entitled to the best possible education. But he said the references to weapons and injury “make a lot of people anxious.” He said residents are inviting elected officials to a Jan. 6 community meeting on the issue at Aspen Hill’s library.

Critics of the relocation plan say the neighborhood was not consulted as the school system developed the idea, with many residents learning of it several days before a hearing on the district’s broader school construction plans.

“Shouldn’t you be talking to the people impacted by this sort of thing before you decide to do it?” resident Peter Giaquinto said in an interview.

School officials said in a statement that there are “strong educational reasons” for relocating the alternative programs to English Manor and that those reasons were detailed to the county school board. “We are following our appropriate processes and believe our students will be well served by this move,” the statement said.

Montgomery expects to file a response to the appeal by mid-January, said schools spokesman Dana Tofig.

Patricia O’Neill, president of the county school board, said the relocation of the alternative programs makes sense. The current building is “not conducive to the educational programming we are providing,” she said, and the district needs a new site for the bus depot.

O’Neill also said she found some remarks at a public hearing last month offensive, reflecting a not-in-my-back-yard attitude “at its worst.” One speaker, O’Neill recalled, cited the proximity of day-care centers to the proposed site of the alternative programs. “Some of their comments were outrageous,” she said.