Opinion: MCPS Is Building Thousands of High School Seats It Doesn’t Need

Anonymous opinion submission. Moderately MOCO knows the author’s identity.

MCPS is scheduled to complete a new high school at Damascus in 2031 with about 700 additional seats to relieve overcrowding at Clarksburg.

The problem is, according to the fall2026 CIP, in 2031 after the addition is completed, Clarksburg will be 251 seats under capacity and Damascus will be 415 seats under capacity. FY 2028 CIP, Chapter 4 FY 2028 CIP, Chapter 4 . After the new school with 700 additional seats is complete there will be nearly 700 empty seats at Clarksburg & Damascus

MCPS continues to build far more high school capacity than is needed. In Fall 2027 5200 new high school seats will be completed at Woodward, Crown & Northwood. The problem is, according to the County Planning Department, in Fall 2027 there will be 54,000 high school seats available with a projected enrollment of less than 50,000. FY2027 Utilization Report

After adding 5200 seats at Crown, Woodward & Northwood there will be a projected 4500 excess seats. In 2031 after the new Damascus high school opens, County planning is projected there will be 4,900 excess seats. If Wootton is not closed, there would be 7,000 excess seats. MCPS is spending about $1 Billion on Crown, Woodward, Northwood and Damascus to build 5,000 excess seats.

In the fall 2026 CIP Wootton chapter, the Superintendent stated: “Based on declining enrollment a 27th high school is not needed to open at this time and the decision was that Thomas S. Wootton High School will be relocated to the Crown Farm facility site”. FY 2028 CIP, Chapter 4

The problem is, MCPS knew back in the fall of 2024 there were not enough students to justify building Crown, the 27th high school, but they built it anyway. Crown was built to reduce overcrowding at Quince Orchard, Richard Montgomery , Gaithersburg and Northwest.

In the fall 2024 CIP these 4 schools were only a combined 460 students over capacity and projected to be 495 students over capacity in 2028. Only Richard Montgomery and Quince Orchard were projected to be significantly over capacity in 2028, for a total of 450 seats over capacity. This was hardly enough students to justify a new 2200 seat high school. MCPS built Crown anyway and is going to close the Wootton building because they built a high school they did not need. gis.mcpsmd.org/cipmasterpdfs/Archive_CIP26EntireBook.pdf

To justify the new expanded Damascus High school , the Superintendent made Damascus 280 students over capacity for Fall 2027 (according to the Fall 2026 CIP). This year Damascus is 53 students under capacity. Damascus was made overcrowded despite boundary study schools being left with hundreds of empty seats.

The superintendent then used the overcrowding at Damascus to justify the new expanded Damascus HS. A February 19, 2026 Education and Culture Committee memorandum stated “MCPS’ priority of the Damascus HS project reflects the need for capacity at Damascus resulting from the implementation of new boundaries for numerous high schools to relieve overcrowding.”

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Editor’s note: The Board of Education’s March 26, 2026 resolution states that Thomas S. Wootton High School “is relocated to the Crown Farm site” and that the action “relocates, and does not close” the school, beginning in the 2027-28 school year; the current Wootton building is slated to become a holding school for secondary schools under renovation. The Damascus High School expansion was in MCPS’s capital plan before the boundary study began, and its roughly $306 million cost covers a full replacement of the existing building as well as added seats, according to MCPS’s fall 2026 capital plan. MCPS’s fall 2024 capital plan still described Crown as needed to relieve crowding in the mid-county region; MCPS first projected surplus seats at the affected high schools in a November 2025 presentation. Montgomery Planning’s staff report counts a net gain of 3,084 high school seats from the Woodward, Northwood and Crown projects, because Wootton’s current building leaves the high school inventory when the school moves. The four projects the author lists total about $962.5 million in MCPS’s fall 2026 plan, including the replacement of Damascus High School and a facility upgrade at Northwood. The February 19 memorandum quoted above was written by County Council staff to the Council’s Education and Culture Committee. Our reporting on the Crown building lays out the projections in detail.

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