Popular (and Fox News-fevered) imagination holds that Montgomery County schools are overrun and overwhelmed by a wave of immigrant children, especially in the Silver Spring corridor.
And there is some truth in that view. But it’s also true that the county is trying to cope with a wave of privileged white students, with some of the most crowded schools in Bethesda and the new boomtown area of Clarksburg.
The fact is that the county remains a popular place to raise families but education resources are overtaxed for communities of all income levels and demographic backgrounds. That’s the case both for schools in the struggling Wheaton, Kennedy and Northwood clusters and for the nationally celebrated “W” high schools—Walt Whitman, Walter Johnson and Winston Churchill.
That’s the message in the new Fiscal Year 2015 Annual School Test approved last week, which determines whether there will be a moratorium or payments imposed on home developers who want to build where classrooms are overcrowded.
So many schools are overcrowded at various levels that some new residential development could be blocked by a moratorium, which kicks in when a school cluster exceeds 120 percent of enrollment capacity.
 |
| Wheaton High School is not overcrowded and a new facility is under construction. But its middle school cluster already is so far beyond capacity that it could trigger a moratorium on new housing. |
Wheaton High School itself is not considered a problem because it is now only 21 students above its 1,320 capacity and it will have room to grow to enrollment of 1,596, with a new facility and separate Edison High School next door now under construction.
Elsewhere at the high school level, Clarksburg also faces a possible moratorium, with a 116 percent utilization rate. In Bethesda, Whitman’s rate stands at 112.7 percent, followed by Walter Johnson (112.6 percent).
New housing development already is subject to a special crowded school facility payment in 16 of the county’s 25 high school clusters. The fee kicks in when high, middle or elementary schools exceed 105 percent of their enrollment capacity. The payment rate is $19,514 per elementary school student, $25,411 per middle school student, and $28,501 per high school student.
In the Silver Spring and Downcounty area, Blair has a 113.5 percent utilization rate at the middle school level, followed by Northwood (112.8 percent for middle schools and 111.9 percent for the high school). Einstein High School has a 108.6 percent rate and Kennedy’s middle school level is at 107 percent.
The somewhat contrary lesson to be learned is that county officials need to encourage more growth—commercial growth, especially east of Connecticut Avenue—by lowering tax and planning barriers. That would add the kind of high-paying private sector jobs that broaden the corporate and personal income tax base in Montgomery County as it faces a future of limited federal government expansion.
You won’t find any hint of that challenge in the latest school test report, which, as always, is a relatively bloodless document. It makes no reference to zoning density or gridlock traffic.
But there is a telling detail that suggests how the economy has hit even Montgomery County’s rich. The report noted that a “pronounced increase in enrollment is also attributed to students entering MCPS from nonpublic schools. This trend is driven by the reputation of the public schools and, more recently, to the impacts of the recession on households’ ability to afford nonpublic schools.”
The report also notes that very little enrollment growth is due to the proliferation of new multifamily housing built before and after the recession.
The report said that “There are many more existing homes available for resale, and rental units for lease, than there are new residential units coming on the market in any given year. Therefore, turnover of existing residential units has a much greater impact on enrollment change than new home sales and new apartment rentals.”
As always, the Planning Board routinely approved the report June 12 without raising basic issues like high taxes, the school test scores achievement gap, language hurdles, or racial and income demographics.
Those are the sort of red meat debates that have seized election year public attention, which was briefly captured by a county report in April that compared 11 high-poverty high schools in the Silver Spring and Gaithersburg areas to 14 low-poverty high schools serving Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Potomac and other neighborhoods.
Overall, the Office of Legislative Oversight (OLO) study described a back-to-the-future Montgomery County similar to 60 years ago, that has become unofficially resegregated despite the 1954 Supreme Court Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that declared separate black and white schools unconstitutional.
The report finds “an increase in the stratification of MCPS high schools by income, race, and ethnicity. OLO also finds that the achievement gap between high- and low-poverty high schools has widened among a majority of measures considered,” including graduation rates, dropout rates and college admission test performance.
The county Board of Education will likely struggle this year with how to address the fact that its system of student choice and magnet programs has failed to close the achievement gap or better integrate schools in the Downcounty and Northeast consortia or the Gaithersburg area. The obvious answer—creating magnet programs countywide and opening high-performing schools to all students—is an obvious non-starter, given the prohibitive political clout of the W schools’ parents.
So that will leave the Planning Board and the County Council tasked with creating a regulatory and tax environment that will steer much more future commercial development to Montgomery’s east side, which will attract high-performing students.
Let’s hope they remember that when the election is over.
very nice blog.......
ReplyDeletehallslanding