A site-selection committee eliminated 13 possible locations for a new Bethesda-Chevy Chase cluster middle school at its meeting Wednesday, leaving 25 public and private candidate sites for the school.
Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Joshua Starr in November proposed re-opening a controversial site-selection process for a second middle school in the crowded B-CC cluster.
The previous site-selection committee, convened last year, recommended a site in Rosemary Hills-Lyttonsville to the Board of Education. But after , the board chose Rock Creek Hills instead. That decision lead to the summer-long feasibility process for the site, which was marked by controversy as neighbors and officials questioned MCPS's transparency and civic engagement.
Wednesday marked the re-opening of the process, which will re-examine potential locations for the new school.
The 42-member committee voted to disqualify sites that house functioning elementary schools and sites smaller than 10 acres.
The votes came after Bruce Crispell, Montgomery County Public Schools director of long-range planning, explained that building the new middle school on an elementary site would require the construction of a new elementary school someplace else, delaying the process by at least two years.
Mike Shpur, an architect for MCPS, said that 10 acres is the minimum amount of space needed to construct an adequate middle school, leading to the committee's vote to trim smaller sites from the list.
At the meeting, facilitated by staff from the Montgomery County Conflict Resolution Center, committee members also listed the pros and cons of each remaining public site, and they will eliminate more candidates at .
The group also has 13 private sites to consider, which it will do in closed session in order to preserve MCPS's ability to negotiate if it decides to purchase a private parcel.
The remaining public candidate sites are:
- near Kensington
- Rosemary Hills-Lyttonsville Park near Silver Spring
- and the former Lynnbrook Elementary School in Bethesda
- A WSSC parcel in Lyttonsville
- near Kensington
- in Chevy Chase
- Tilden Middle School in Rockville
- in Bethesda
- in Chevy Chase
- in Chevy Chase
- A Montgomery County bus Lot in Brookville
Aquiring sites on the public list may not be easy for MCPS, however. Most of the candidate parcels are owned by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, which, in an April letter from Planning Board Chairwoman Françoise Carrier, said it does not consider siting a school to be reason enough to do away with park land.
The committee will , trimming more sites from the list and eventually assigning numerical scores to each option. The group's top sites will then be sent to Superintendent Joshua Starr in February, and he will issue a recommendation to the Board of Education for a March vote.
Starr has said all along that MCPS needs to open the new school by 2017 in order to deal with overcrowding at Westland Middle School and counteract the district's projected enrollment growth. He said the restarted site selection will not delay that goal.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the Lynnbrook site under consideration. It has been corrected.
No weighting is attributed to selection criteria, opening the process to arbitrariness. Moreover, the criteria are general, and thus, impede a consistent site comparison. For example, one site was said to have “not good” access, despite the fact that access exists along 3 compass points, including a road multiple times the size of roads at other sites, with a median separating traffic in each direction, with each roadway possessing a separate parking lane. Another site, however, was said to have good access despite the fact that it has only one physical road with restricted parking and a change in naming convention (which allows them to assert access from 2 roads). In addition, site descriptions were prepared inconsistently. One description identified concerns about the use of POS funds at the site, and another description omitted the use of such funds and/or LWCF funds at its associated site, despite the fact that the use of those funds contributed to the decision to re-do the selection. One site had a reference to trees lining its perimeter, and another site had no reference to the existence of specimen trees, all of which, the county acknowledged, would have to be obliterated. Sadly, the process again is flawed, and I fear its recommendation will cause another delay in the construction of this needed school.
The remaining park was developed with LWCF and/or POS funds, and by law, it can’t be converted from park use without replacing it in the community with land of equal monetary and recreational value. As the Park person said, the replacement value of the land exceeds the park’s appraised value. So, even if MCPS wanted to request the initiation of statutory conversion procedures, they’re stuck. Also, their park’s feasibility study says MCPS needs to remove and replace 5.1 acres of forestation. As the Planning gentleman said, they need Planning approval to do that. Based on the lot size and the stated minimum requirement of 10.1 flat acres (not including other buffers, sidewalks, etc.), if they don’t get approval, it appears that the available site will be about 8 acres, and thus, they can’t build on it. In sum, these aren’t neighborhood opposition problems; they’re availability problems based on law and policy. Maybe the lesson is that Park and Planning, and not MCPS, should be handling these issues.-Tom
MCPS has demonstrated that it can’t plan flatulence in a bean factory. It needs to be removed from the process, and community planning issues should be managed by the professionals in Park and Planning, but that’s a fight for another day. In the meantime, the only way this sham is going to be repulsed is for all the communities not protected in this process (which is a story for another day) to work together and fight these people politically.-Tom
http://www.mccaedu.org/centers/bethesda_lynbrook.html "MCPS bus transportation to and from Bethesda, North Chevy Chase, Rosemary Hills, and Chevy Chase Elementary Schools. " But it was a school from 1940 something until early 80s. I guess it is legit
Also, you can find the schools' PowerPoint presentation on the sites here: http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/facilities/REM/pdf/BCC%20MS%20Site%20Presentation%20for%20SSAC%20011212%20Public%20Sites.pdf