Steve Burns
WMAL.com

ROCKVILLE – (WMAL) Montgomery County Public Schools officials met with County Councilmembers Monday to address a pressing need – more emphasis on additions and new buildings at the middle and high school levels. School officials say the wave of elementary growth will soon hit upper levels, and they remain in desperate need of more space.

“It’s like 2,500 a year that we’ve been absorbing in growth. Almost all of that has been at the elementary level,” Bruce Crispell, MCPS’ Direcotr of Long-Term Planning, said Monday. “We’re just beginning to see the wave move up to the middles and high schools.”

School officials maintained they have “dozens” of plans to add classroom space through additions and new buildings, but they are contingent on funding from the County that may not come through.

“We’re accommodating a lot of that growth through additions at existing schools where we can go bigger, and that has really been a good strategy for us,” Crispell said. “But eventually we’ll have to consider new buildings as well.”

Crispell indicated the system is already bursting at the seams.

“Twelve of our 25 clusters are basically over-capacity at either the elementary, middle, high or a combination,” he said. “Half of our school system continues to be over-capacity at some level.”

He anticipated an increase of 6,900 high school students over the next six years, though also mentioned the system was looking forward to relief at the elementary level in the next few years due to a decrease in births during the Great Recession. The overall increase in enrollment, Crispell said, is directly tied to an influx of minorities over the last few decades.

“We’ve been trending down consistently in white non-Hispanic, and up in Hispanic since 2000,” Crispell said. “Those lines are already crossing at our elementary schools K-4. We have more Hispanic than white non-Hispanic students there.”

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