Montgomery County has a shortage of housing, particularly in the fast-growing, transit-accessible parts of the county. It also has a shortage of school capacity in those areas, since the County focused for decades on serving students in more suburban areas while closing schools inside the Beltway. One consequence of this is a moratorium on approving new housing in many of the most transit-accessible parts of the County, triggered by a lack of capacity in those areas’ schools—even though many students come from existing homes, not newly built ones.

The County clearly needs a lot more housing in transit-accessible areas, but it also needs school capacity to remove its self-imposed housing moratorium in many of these areas. One partial solution: build as much school capacity as possible on the County school sites in high-demand areas. However, County leaders are failing to propose bold school-building initiatives out of some combination of budget pressures, lack of vision, and fear of NIMBY opposition. This failure will have a long-term detrimental effect on Montgomery County.

Worse yet, while there is space in schools that could address some of these capacity constraints, the County ignited a firestorm of angry opposition when it merely commissioned a study of possible benefits of adjusting school attendance boundaries. This leaves Montgomery County stuck, for the foreseeable future, with oversubscribed schools in much of the downcounty.

SSIMS and SCES

Less than a mile from the Silver Spring Metro station and adjacent to an under-construction Purple Line station, the old Blair High school site houses two schools: Silver Spring International Middle School (SSIMS) and Sligo Creek Elementary School (SCES). The dated facilities need work, and MCPS saw the Purple Line work as an opportunity to do that. Initial plans called for moving some SCES students to a temporary site for a few years while MCPS performed some modest renovation work and perhaps added a small addition.

Plans have now evolved to (1) give the whole site over to SSIMS while downsizing work plans there even further, and (2) move SCES to some combination of the old Parkside Elementary site and an expanded Highland View Elementary. Both of these sites are a bit further from downtown Silver Spring but still in high-demand areas.

Faced with three potential sites, the County isn’t proposing building a full-size school on the Parkside site, nor does it plan to build a more dense addition on the current SSIMS/SCES site. Instead the County is proposing doing the bare minimum amount of work at each to meet demand under the current boundaries. The proposal for Highland View appears to be similarly modest, adding enough space to deal with its overcapacity and new demands from these moves, but little more.

MCPS appears to be making such modest plans out of fear of opposition from neighbors to either denser development or any shifts in school boundaries. This is related to another major problem with Montgomery County schools: they’re segregated by race and income.

Single-family zoning keeps our neighborhoods segregated too, but shouldn’t be an excuse not to build dense schools where they’re needed. Similarly, MCPS may be reluctant to take proposals to the Planning Board to request a third story or more, but County leaders should recognize the need for these schools instead of letting zoning processes block them.

Suburban schools for a denser district?

MCPS’s facilities planning regulation includes expectations for large sites: 7.5 acres (more than three standard city blocks) for elementary schools, and two and four times that size for middle and high schools. Sites of this size may make sense for low-density suburban areas, but are completely out of place in the county’s more dense areas.

Changing this suburban mindset doesn’t mean going into uncharted territory, since cities have been building large schools on small sites for decades. But there’s also opportunity for innovation: for example, Hawaii recently planned an elementary school in the first four stories of a 10-story residential tower. Montgomery County has an excess of office space, some of which could be converted for school use. But when it comes to building multistory school buildings in urban settings, nobody needs to reinvent the wheel here.

What can be done?

The Montgomery County Council has imposed a housing moratorium due to a lack of school capacity, but hasn’t funded enough new construction or worked to encourage more multistory schools in dense, walkable locations. If the County keeps failing to make the best use of the school sites it has, it will forfeit any chance to get these capacity issues under control.

Montgomery County leaders need to rethink suburban-oriented school planning policies in an urbanizing county and provide funding for dense school construction in urban areas. They could start by taking the best advantage of existing sites, like putting together an ambitious proposal to dramatically increase capacity at the SSIMS/SCES site and better use the Parkside and Highland View sites. But without realigning school construction for its urban areas, Montgomery County will continue to suffer capacity constraints that put a drag on growth and the county’s economic prospects.