Opinion: A Lesson from the Last Wave. How School Closures Echo for Decades

This piece was submitted by a parent at Wood Acres Elementary School. The views are the author’s own. Moderately MOCO knows the author’s identity and is withholding her name at her request, because she did not want her family connected publicly to her child’s school. Submissions run in the writer’s words.

By a Wood Acres Elementary parent

I often wondered how my child’s elementary school evolved to what it is today. Its student population is substantially larger than the other schools in the cluster—and, at well over 600 students, it is the third largest elementary school with a Bethesda address. Conversely, it has a curiously tiny physical footprint—only one of five schools this size housed on less than five acres of land.

The answers start with the school consolidation decisions of 1981—the timeframe that MCPS continues to reference as the last period of declining enrollment. As Montgomery County goes into this latest consolidation process, I think it’s a worthwhile exercise to look at the outcomes of past decisions over the last 45 years. I’m simply using my child’s school as a case study.

What happened in 1981

After pouring through archived Board of Education meeting documents, I learned the Board voted to close and consolidate 28 schools in the fall of 1981, a non-election year, effective for the 1982-1983 school year. Since hindsight is 20/20, these years are often used as the start of the birth-year range for the Millennial generation, the children and ‘echo’ of America’s largest generation, the Baby Boomers. The Baby Boomers were the reason MCPS had to build so many schools in the first place throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Brookmont Elementary School in the southern corner of Bethesda was one of the 28 schools closed and consolidated. That building now houses the Washington Waldorf School. The Board of Education made the choice to close Brookmont and send its students to nearby Wood Acres Elementary. Many of the large elementary schools in the county were similarly affected by the consolidations, fully absorbing a closed school—Harmony Hills, Luxmanor, and Glenallan, for example.

A school that grew, on a site that could not

As the student population started to grow again through the 1990s, Wood Acres received a modernization renovation in 2001, and to make it happen, Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC) had to convey 2.19 acres to MCPS to even achieve the current 4.78-acre footprint. (MCPS’ own FAA-RA policy advocates for a minimum site size of 7.5 acres for elementary schools.) But the school quickly outgrew that 2001-era renovation and kept growing.

By the time Wood Acres received its most current addition in 2016, to the tune of $7.48M, it had 7 relocatable classrooms, taking up most of the blacktop play space on a very small campus. The 8-classroom addition made that playground and blacktop loss permanent, leaving the students with one of the smallest outdoor play space-per-student ratios in the county.

And, while the 8-classroom addition addressed the programming space needs, it didn’t adequately fix the core capacity space constraints beyond the classroom. The renovation didn’t increase the size of the Media Center and only marginally increased the All-Purpose Room (APR), better known as the cafeteria. That means the school still runs 6 separate lunch and recess periods every day because of the space limitations—just as it did before the renovation. We also must turn families away from community events because we simply don’t have spaces big enough to accommodate everyone.

What it looks like day to day

On the childcare front, we have more need than capacity. Newer students get bused to another, smaller school in the area as an overflow space. And this fall, we outgrew the transportation to that space, leaving new families scrambling to find childcare or transportation alternatives. So, as we follow this consolidation process, families worry that the overflow option might be at risk of closing, and that closure would send a shockwave through our school community as well.

I am not seeing decreasing enrollment in our elementary school. My child’s grade had a 10% increase in students from last year. Another grade opened a whole new class. Anecdotally, we are noticing a lot of home sales of aging neighbors to younger families in the neighborhood as Baby Boomers reach a life stage where they need more care. We are also noticing the effects of new housing developments within in our boundaries, mainly Westbard Square. The State highway that runs through our boundary has also been identified as a potential future growth corridor with upzoning implications.

Why it matters now

I share this all to illustrate that school closures and consolidations are not short-term impacts, or even decade-long impacts. The decisions made 45 years ago are still impacting the student experience at Wood Acres today, and in ways that are not always considered—super early or late lunch periods or recess time in crowded spaces, the need for part-time specials teachers or other support staff that cover the classes but are not fully integrated into the school community, childcare limitations, and excluding families due to limited capacity at community-building events.

I understand that MCPS has much better data and forecasting tools than were available in 1981, and has some very real, very difficult financial realities to confront. But as these decisions could hold their own significant capital improvement needs in the future, we should make sure that we recognize and study the consequences of consolidations as illustrated by our own 45-year history lest we be doomed to repeat them.

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Editor’s note on two figures. The county’s capital project record for the 2016 Wood Acres addition (project P136508) lists total expenditures of $8.6 million. The $7.48 million cited above corresponds to the construction and site-work lines; the balance covers planning, design and supervision. The same record confirms the addition was completed in August 2016 and that the school’s program capacity before it was 551 students.

Montgomery County Public Schools is weighing school closures and consolidations again this year. Moderately MOCO reported on what the Board of Education was and was not deciding at its October 8 meeting here.

Moderately MOCO welcomes opinion submissions from Montgomery County residents. Send them through the site.

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