On September 30, 2026, Bethesda Today/Bethesda Magazine published the following Opinion Editorial by Councilmember Adam Van Grack

Opinion: Here’s what MCPS must demonstrate before closing a school

As the district explores closing elementary, middle schools, officials must learn from past lessons

Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) recently announced that declining enrollment will lead it to consider closing elementary and middle schools. Declining enrollment should certainly be part of responsible facilities planning. However, closing a neighborhood school is a long-term decision that should require an extremely robust standard that MCPS must meet before we close another school.

First, MCPS must establish a sufficiently reliable picture of future enrollment. We recently addressed this issue during the Wootton and Crown boundary study. In March, the Board of Education voted to end the comprehensive high school operations at the Wootton Parkway campus in Rockville. Beginning next school year, Wootton students will be reassigned to the new Crown Farm site in Gaithersburg or Winston Churchill High School in Potomac.

That process exposed problems with the district’s enrollment projections. In February and March, the Rockville Mayor and Council raised concerns that MCPS failed to include Rockville’s approved planning documents, which anticipate substantial future housing growth. The City also pointed to a very current example of why those projections deserve scrutiny: Richard Montgomery High School already relies on nine portable classrooms and serves nearly 2,400 students, yet MCPS projects enrollment to decline in the years ahead despite thousands of additional housing units already approved and planned in Rockville’s center. The Richard Montgomery cluster itself questioned how that projection could square with existing overcrowding and incoming housing development.

State Senator Cheryl Kagan separately raised concerns about MCPS enrollment estimates and the challenges created when municipalities such as Rockville and Gaithersburg control their own zoning and development decisions while MCPS plans schools countywide.

Specifically, the Wootton discussion highlighted an MCPS methodological problem that must be addressed before MCPS decides to close another school. While MCPS uses some housing-pipeline information, the district’s methodology only counts projects after they reach specified far-along stages, i.e., approved preliminary/site plans. MCPS assigns no projected enrollment to projects that have not reached those qualifying stages. MCPS certainly should not assume that every unit envisioned in a master plan will be built; however, the calculations for growth should not be simply all or nothing.

Under the current MCPS approach, a hypothetical, project-approved 500-unit townhouse development in Rockville Town Center on the verge of a site plan approval receives the exact same projected enrollment value as a vacant cornfield in Poolesville: zero.  For long-range enrollment planning, those two properties should certainly not have the exact same value.

MCPS should instead evaluate different stages of development using probability assumptions. Before permanently eliminating school capacity, MCPS must start using all the data available to it.

The district’s history provides a reason for caution. MCPS closed Woodward High School in Rockville in 1987 during a period of declining enrollment and consolidated its students into Bethesda’s Walter Johnson. In the years that followed, Bethesda and North Bethesda continued to grow, and by 2001, Walter Johnson began a major expansion that added 19 classrooms and student space. Today, MCPS is preparing to reopen Woodward as a comprehensive high school to help address overcrowding at Walter Johnson and other schools. That history shows why today’s enrollment projections should be treated with caution when making decisions about school capacity that may affect communities for decades.

Second, we cannot let enrollment projections completely overshadow the value of neighborhood schools. For decades, one of the district’s strengths has been the connection between schools and the communities they serve. Schools regularly become part of the fabric of a neighborhood.

Research gives us good reason to be cautious about addressing under-enrollment simply by creating fewer, larger schools. In A Review of Empirical Evidence About School Size Effects: A Policy Perspective, Kenneth Leithwood and Doris Jantzi examined 57 empirical studies and found that the overall weight of the evidence favored smaller schools, particularly for students who struggle academically and students from disadvantaged backgrounds. This research suggests that school-closure decisions should consider more than whether consolidation improves a utilization percentage. School size, transportation, walkability, student disruption, family involvement, and the connection between a school and its surrounding community should all be part of the decision.

Finally, we need to examine the financial assumptions behind any school closure decision. Montgomery County unquestionably faces significant capital constraints. Earlier this year, however, the County Council unfortunately rejected a proposal to increase general obligation bond capacity toward the County Executive’s proposed six-year level of more than $2.19 billion. MCPS should also make far greater use of alternative mechanisms for financing school facilities, including public-private partnerships. We need significant change, not just one small public-private partnership project. Similarly, the County and MCPS must review MCPS property that is no longer needed for educational purposes and determine whether selling, leasing, or otherwise putting those assets to productive use could help support school capital needs. None of these options are a “golden ticket” to escape the financial dilemma facing MCPS; however, all financial alternatives should be seriously evaluated before we use financial justifications to close another school.

I am not suggesting that every MCPS school remain open forever regardless of enrollment or cost. The better question is: What must MCPS demonstrate before closing a school?

I strongly believe that standard should include (1) a durable enrollment decline in the community the school actually serves, (2) enrollment forecasts that meaningfully account for future development, (3) a thorough analysis of the educational and community effects of consolidation, (4) consideration of the cost of recreating capacity if projections prove wrong, (5) a serious review of all reasonable financing alternatives, and (6) compliance with Maryland’s legal procedures governing permanent school closures under COMAR 13A.02.09 for every closure.

The decision to close Wootton did not satisfy these important requirements. MCPS did not use Maryland’s school-closure procedures because it characterized this significant action as a “relocation,” a characterization with which I strongly disagree. Although MCPS considered some overlapping issues during the boundary study, it did not apply the more rigorous closure standard that should govern a decision of this magnitude. To the district’s credit, it has now said that the framework for upcoming elementary and middle school decisions will be aligned with COMAR 13A.02.09. However, the Wootton decision still looms large.

The Wootton process exposed weaknesses in how MCPS accounts for future growth. Woodward showed what can happen when yesterday’s excess capacity becomes tomorrow’s overcrowding. As MCPS considers additional school closures across Montgomery County, we should strictly apply those lessons before making decisions that could shape our communities and our school system for decades.

Rockville City Councilmember Adam Van Grack is an MCPS graduate and parent.