MCPS’s Culture of Neglect: How Deferred Maintenance Became a Systemwide Failure

March 26, 2026 – By Brian Rabin, MCPS Parent and PTSA Leader – Submitted Opinion

A System Allowed to Fail

Montgomery County Public Schools manages billions of dollars in public assets, buildings constructed with taxpayer investment and entrusted to the district for responsible stewardship. Yet for decades, MCPS has deferred maintenance, ignored warnings, and allowed schools to deteriorate while insisting publicly that its facilities are “well maintained.” The superintendent’s recommendation to close Wootton High School and relocate its students to Crown is not a plan. It is an attempt to convert the system’s own neglect into justification for abandoning a community’s high school.

Systemwide Decay, Not Isolated Failure

MCPS’s ADA self evaluation of 198 facilities identified widespread barriers: noncompliant entrances, inaccessible restrooms, missing alarms, and inadequate interior routes. These are not minor issues; they are civil rights obligations. Yet MCPS has never fully funded or executed a systemwide ADA transition plan. Instead, barriers accumulated, and the district now points to the resulting “condition” as evidence that relocation or closure is necessary. This is not planning. It is neglect, repackaged as strategy.

Neglect Repackaged as Strategy

A healthy facilities program relies on preventive maintenance; MCPS relies on crisis response. Damascus, Magruder, and Wootton generate hundreds of work orders annually because their systems are failing. Instead of addressing the underlying problems, the district has normalized deterioration and then used that deterioration to justify extreme proposals. The superintendent’s recommendation to close Wootton and relocate the community to Crown is framed as a response to building conditions. But the condition is not an accident; it is the result of MCPS’s own decisions. The superintendent also claimed that “only one community” opposed the relocation, dismissing documented concerns from families across multiple clusters, as well as the Maryland Building Industry Association and the City of Rockville. That is not community engagement. It is selective listening designed to manufacture consent.

The recommendation contradicts MCPS Policy FAA, which requires transparent, data driven, equitable planning. Instead, the district offered a plan that reduces long term capacity in a growth area, removes Wootton as a permanent high school, disrupts multiple clusters, ignores facility condition data for Damascus and Magruder, and uses deteriorated buildings as justification for closure rather than modernization. It is a plan built on bad data, bad assumptions, and bad faith.

Not a Funding Problem – A Priority Problem

MCPS receives more than $2 billion per year. The issue is not the absence of money; it is the absence of will. For decades, Damascus, Magruder, and Wootton have been told to wait. Meanwhile, every other high school built in the 1970s or earlier has been modernized. This is not coincidence. It is a pattern. A vote for the superintendent’s recommendation is a vote to reward neglect, not correct it.

There is a Path Forward

Montgomery County cannot continue pretending that traditional CIP cycles alone will solve a backlog created over decades. Other jurisdictions have turned to public private partnerships to accelerate school construction, modernize aging facilities, and reduce long term maintenance costs. MCPS should do the same. A well structured P3 model, transparent, accountable, and aligned with community priorities, could finally deliver the modernizations Damascus, Magruder, Wootton, and Cold Spring have been denied for generations. The county must explore every tool available, not default to closures that punish communities for the system’s own failures.

End the Cycle of Neglect

MCPS’s culture of neglect did not happen by accident. It is the result of deliberate choices to defer maintenance, to ignore warnings, to postpone modernizations, and to let buildings decay until the damage became politically convenient. The Board of Education now faces a defining moment. It can ratify that neglect, or it can end it. The superintendent’s recommendation is not a plan. It is a concession that the system failed to care for the very buildings it now proposes to abandon. The Board must reject this recommendation, clearly and unequivocally, and commit to rebuilding the schools MCPS allowed to crumble.

Note: Brian Rabin is Wootton HS PTSA President but the views expressed here are the personal views of Brian Rabin, in his capacity as an MCPS parent and PTSA leader. This op-Ed and the views expressed herein are not in representation of the Wootton HS PTSA.

---

^{Community Reports and Opinions – are the community reporting. See here for more.}

^{The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the “Community Reports” and “Opinions” sections of our blog belong solely to the individual authors, and not necessarily to Moderately MOCO, its editors, other contributors, or any affiliated entities or organizations.}

---