Category Archives: schools

Adam Pagnucco, COVID-19, MCPS, schools

Reopening Decisions by School District So Far

By Adam Pagnucco.

Editor’s note: this post has been updated to include Washington County, Maryland.

In the aftermath of discussion about MCPS’s reopening plans, let’s take a look at what other districts are planning. Bear in mind that jurisdictions in Maryland and Virginia are bound by state guidance and they have had different coronavirus infection rates. Below is a summary of the approaches taken by 18 school districts in the Washington-Baltimore region.

Opening with online only as first phase (7 districts)

Arlington County: Schools will begin on September 8 with full-time distance learning. Parents may choose a hybrid model combining distance learning and physical school, which will begin implementation in October.

Charles County: Schools will start with all virtual learning “with a goal of transitioning to Phase 2 as quickly as possible. Phase 2 would include in-person instruction for special populations of students.”

Harford County: Distance learning only for the first semester. A limited number of spaces in physical schools will be offered to students to help them access online instruction.

Howard County: Distance learning only through January 28.

Prince George’s County: Distance learning only for the first two quarters of the school year.

Prince William County: The school year will begin with distance learning only for the first quarter (September 8 through October 30). Afterwards, “the goal will be to transition to a 50% capacity model in the second quarter, with the option for students to remain virtual.”

Washington County: “Washington County Public Schools (WCPS) students will begin the 2020-2021 school year with all students in grades pre-k through 12 engaged in distance learning. The Board of Education unanimously agreed to adopt a model of full distance learning beginning August 31, 2020 and continuing until it is safe for students to physically return to school.”

Preliminary plan with online only as first phase (3 districts)

Calvert County: “On July 16th, the Board of Education of Calvert County Public Schools decided to continue the discussion of how to open the 2020-2021 school year. To ensure the safety of staff and students during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Board is in favor of starting the year online for all students. Board members recognize, however, that barriers exist for some students to learn online. The Board will continue to accept public comments about meeting the needs of students with limited or no internet connectivity or other challenges through July 22nd.”

Carroll County: Reopening will occur in three sequential phases: enhanced virtual/distance learning for all students, hybrid model combining distance learning and some in-person instruction and a traditional model. Parents may opt for online only for the entire fall semester.

Montgomery County: Schools will begin with distance learning and eventually phase in some in-person instruction. The teachers union and MCPS management have shared their perspectives on the plan.

Opening with choice model (1 district)

Fairfax County: Parents have been given a choice between full-time distance learning and a hybrid option with at least two days in physical schools.

Preliminary plan with hybrid or choice model (2 districts)

District of Columbia: According to a preliminary plan, parents may choose between all online learning or a hybrid of in-person and online. Mayor Muriel Bowser has said a final plan will be announced on July 31.

Frederick County: A draft plan suggests that most schools will open with a hybrid model in which students will be divided into two cohorts and alternate between two days in physical school and three days in virtual learning.

No plan yet (5 districts)

Alexandria City: The district is still in its planning process and does not yet have a draft plan.

Anne Arundel County: The district is still in its planning process and does not yet have a draft plan.

Baltimore City: The district is preparing a preliminary plan for consideration by the school board on July 28.

Baltimore County: No decision has been made.

Loudoun County: No plan has yet been released.

So far, no public school district in the region has said it will reopen with 100% traditional in-person instruction.

Share
budget, MCPS, schools

Placeholders, Indeed, Do Have a Place in the MCPS Capital Budget

By Glenn Orlin.

In a recent piece in Seventh State it was argued that so-called “placeholder” projects have no place in the Montgomery County Public Schools capital program. But there are very good reasons why the County Council has done exactly that for the past eight years.

First, some background.  The Subdivision Staging Policy (SSP) Public School Adequacy Test compares enrollment five years in advance—at each cluster and level (HS, MS, or ES), and at each school—against the budgeted capacity at each cluster/level and school five school years hence.  If the future enrollment exceeds the future capacity in a cluster by more than 20% at any level, then the cluster goes into a housing moratorium; that is, no more housing subdivisions can be approved until the capacity standard is met.  (Relocatable classrooms are not counted towards “capacity” under the School Adequacy Test.) If the future enrollment exceeds the future capacity in a MS service area by more than 20% and 180 students, then that MS service area goes into a housing moratorium.  If the future enrollment exceeds the future capacity in an ES service area by more than 20% and 110 students, then that ES service area goes into a housing moratorium.  The five-year rule was selected many years ago because, on average, that is how long it takes for a housing subdivision approval to morph into occupied housing units, many of them having kids of school age.

At the start of this decade the Council began the practice of budgeting generic “Solution” (i.e., placeholder) CIP projects in certain circumstances.  The rationale is that while a cluster or school service area might have enrollment that exceeds the moratorium threshold, in many cases MCPS is concurrently planning for a new school or addition that would provide sufficient capacity in time to avoid such a moratorium.  The Council has approved Solution projects only when all the following conditions are met:

  1. A cluster or school service area is projected to exceed the moratorium threshold;
  2. MCPS is concurrently—or about to start—planning for a capital project that would address the potential moratorium; and
  3. MCPS’s normal schedule for planning, design, and construction would have the project’s added capacity opening by the start of the school year five years hence.

The most recent application of the School Test was approved by the Planning Board on June 22, 2017.  The Board placed seven ES service areas into moratorium: Burnt Mills, Highland View, Kemp Mill, Lake Seneca, Rosemont, Strawberry Knoll, and Summit Hall.  At that time, while all of them met Condition #1, none of them met Conditions #2 and #3.  Eight other clusters or school service areas were not placed into moratorium because Solution projects were justifiable and programmed: they met all three conditions.  In the FY19-24 CIP several of these Solution projects will be replaced by specific projects that the Board of Education (BOE) is now officially ready to recommend.  This new CIP will include only four Solution projects.

It is important to note that the decision to budget a Solution project for a school has nothing to do with whether there are new housing applications in that area awaiting the Planning Board’s approval.  Condition #1 occurs either when projected enrollment growth due to turnover, already approved new housing, or both, will be over the capacity threshold.  Whether there are impending housing development applications simply doesn’t matter in the decision to budget a Solution project or not.  Now let’s turn to the examples raised in the earlier Seventh State piece.

Bethesda ES and Somerset ES.  The service areas for both schools in the B-CC Cluster are projected to be well over capacity (+25% and +27%, respectively) in five years, that is, by the start of the 2023-24 school year.  MCPS is initiating an elementary school capacity study for the B-CC Cluster, which would examine a range of options.  The study will be conducted during the 2018-2019 school year.  The Board of Education (BOE) will then be in position to propose a specific project in its FY21-26 CIP request; if that project’s funding were to begin in FY21, then, following the normal schedule for planning, design, and construction it could open at the start of the 2023-24 school year.  Because all three conditions are met—a projected moratorium, planning about to begin, and a path to project completion in five years—the Council is poised to fund Solution projects for Bethesda ES and Somerset ES.  The total amount to be budgeted for these two Solution projects is about $6.4 million.  When a specific project is ready to be budgeted, this $6.4 million will be used to help fund it.

Judith A. Resnik ES.  The current CIP has a fully funded addition at this Magruder Cluster school (which would bring its capacity up to 740), but the BOE deleted the construction funding in its request for the FY19-24 CIP.  Enrollment is trending downward, although in five years it is still projected to exceed the moratorium standard if there is no addition.  The BOE is continuing planning for an addition, however.  So, since all three of the above conditions are met, the Council is planning to fund a $2.7 million Solution project for Resnik ES.

The fourth Solution project is about $6.3 million for Einstein HS, which the Council had already initiated, and the BOE itself has recommended continuing it. Therefore, the sum of the four Solution projects is about $15.4 million.  All but $3.7 million would be programmed in the last three years of the CIP (FYs22-24).

Burnt Mills ES.  This school is projected to be 47% over capacity in 2023-24, so certainly Condition #1 is met.  However, MCPS is requesting the Council to set aside in the CIP $120 million (talk about your placeholders!) while it undertakes a thorough review of the prior revitalization/expansion program “in order to develop a multi-variable approach to determine the priority order of large-scale renovations, possibly including programmatic and capacity considerations” (Superintendent’s FY19 CIP Request, page 1-2).  Therefore, the Burnt Mills situation meets neither Condition #2 nor #3.  Once the BOE has determined a strategy for this school, its improvement would either be partially funded as a Solution project or fully funded from the outset.

Ashburton ES.  If the argument is being made that Solution projects are budgeted to meet the desires of new development, then consider the case of Ashburton in the Walter Johnson Cluster.  It is projected to be more than 22% over capacity five years from now, meeting Condition #1.  Just last fall the Council approved the Rock Spring Master Plan which allows for at least 2,300 more housing units than exists or is already approved.  Almost all the Rock Spring area is within the Ashburton ES service area.  Nevertheless, since MCPS is not undertaking planning for additional capacity that would further relieve Ashburton, its service area will go into a housing moratorium in July.

E. Brooke Lee MS Addition. When the Council approves the CIP, it assures that there is enough money to pay for the projects it is budgeting in each of the CIP’s six years.  The Council is approving a tighter CIP this year than in the past, because it recognizes that debt service on borrowing has grown too high.  (Debt service is an obligation that must be paid before anything else in the budget, including salaries.)  Earlier this year the Council asked for the Superintendent to provide it with a list of “non-recommended” projects that would be the first choices to be reduced or deferred, should the Council need them to meet the spending limits.

One of the projects on his list was to delay the construction funding for Lee MS by one year, although not to delay the first-year (FY19) design funds, which would allow the opportunity for the project to be reaccelerated next year.  In its worksession on April 17, several members of the Council expressed the desire to delay neither the design nor the construction funds for the Lee MS project.  To accommodate this desire, there is a shortfall of $8 million in FY20 and $9.5 million in FY21 for which funds must be found.  We will do our best to do that, but deleting the Solution projects would contribute nearly nothing to this effort; there is only $169,000 in Solution project funds in FY20, and only $3.6 million in FY21; the remaining $11.7 million is in FY22 and later.

Do Solution projects almost never get done in five years, as the Seventh State article claims?  In fact, almost every project does get done within five years, or, the BOE later decides that the project isn’t needed after all.   In the article, it is stated that most of the Solution projects added in FY15 did not translate into actual projects within five years, which would have been the 2019-2020 school year.  For FY15 the Council added Solution projects for five Downcounty Consortium elementary schools: Brookhaven, Glen Haven, Highland, Kemp Mill, and Sargent Shriver.  Two years later, however, the BOE retracted its request for these projects, noting that the projected seat deficits were no longer high enough for it to request funds for additions there (see the FY17 Educational Facilities Master Plan, pages 4-37 through 4-41).

Is “real money” being taken out of the MCPS for Solution projects?  In a word, no.  The Council never budgets all the money it could in the CIP.  This is because the Council needs to reserve funds for: (1) when construction bids come in over estimates; (2) for when projects that are in the planning stage are ready for construction funding later in the CIP period; and (3) for unanticipated opportunities or emergencies that arise.  For these reasons, the Council this year will probably set aside a capital reserve of about 9% of the funds available for budgeting, as has been recommended by the County Executive.  But, after all, a Solution project is but a designated reserve, so the Council—as it has in the past—will likely set an undesignated capital reserve less than the Executive recommended by the $15.4 million in these Solution projects.  Therefore, the Solution projects do not compete with other projects in the MCPS CIP, nor with those in the County Government, Montgomery College, or Park & Planning CIPs.  If anything, the Solution projects provide a first claim on the capital reserve.

In summary, Solution projects in the CIP in no way compete with other projects, and they avoid housing moratoria in certain situations where they are not warranted.

Glenn Orlin is the Deputy Director of the Office of the County Council.  He has been the Council’s CIP Coordinator for the last 26 years.

 

 

Share
Adam Pagnucco, MCPS, schools

No-Win Situation: Council Angers Two Influential Groups at the Same Time

By Adam Pagnucco.

Suppose you’re a County Council incumbent gearing up for the next election.  There are eight months to go.  The economy isn’t great.  A big, unpopular tax hike was passed a year ago.  Seventy percent of the voters just voted for term limits.  Dozens of challengers with all kinds of messages carrying the powerful weapon of public financing are fanning out through the county.  So what do you do?

There may not be a lot of good options these days, but antagonizing two of the more powerful groups in the county would not be a high priority on anyone’s list.  And that’s what happened last Tuesday.

The pebble in the council’s shoe this time was debt service.  Much of the county’s six-year capital budget is financed by bonds, and of those, the biggest single financing source for projects is General Obligation (GO) bonds.  GO bonds are not tied to specific revenue sources as some other bonds are; rather, they are backed by the full faith and credit of the county.  The county is rightly proud of its AAA GO bond rating, the highest rating offered by credit agencies, and kept it even through the terrible years of the Great Recession.  But maintaining a AAA rating, which allows the privilege of paying the lowest interest rates on the market, is difficult.  When a local jurisdiction carries too much debt relative to its resources, it risks a downgrade and higher interest rates.  County leadership is justifiably careful about this and has acted to protect its bond rating in the past.

Recently, County Executive Ike Leggett requested that the council cut the level of GO bonds issued in future years, saying that the current amount is excessive and might be regarded as a credit risk.  Last Tuesday, the council unanimously voted to cut the six-year issue of GO bonds from $2.04 billion (the level in the last capital budget) to $1.86 billion.  On an annual basis, GO bond issuances would decline from $340 million in FY18 to $300 million in FY22-24.

The concerns of the Executive and the council about GO bonds are legitimate.  Bonds are paid off through debt service, which is part of the operating budget and competes with other types of spending.  But debt service is a different kind of spending than any other county expenditure.  Once bonds are issued, they MUST be paid one way or the other or the alternative is default.  Below is the recent history of county debt service payments in comparison to the total tax-supported budget.  Debt service roughly doubled between FY05 and FY18.  As a percent of the tax-supported budget, it fell from 7.3% in FY04 to 6.0% in FY09, but has since risen to 8.5% in FY18.  If it keeps rising, it will eventually squeeze out money for public schools operations, public safety and a range of valuable services.

Much of the increase in debt service has been driven by school construction.  The county’s six-year capital budget in FY05-10 included $786 million in local funding for school construction.  By the FY17-22 capital budget, that total had risen to $1.4 billion.  That’s real money, folks!  And while the state kicks in school construction money too, it could do a better job of it.

The council’s cut of GO bonds is normally the kind of action that occurs after an election, not right before one.  Now the county’s elected officials are in trouble with two influential groups.

The PTAs

The Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) have one of the largest networks in the county.  Almost every one of the county’s 200 or so public schools has a PTA.  Most have groups of officers and many have volunteer committees.  Perhaps most importantly, most have listservs with parents on them.  No one really knows exactly how many parents are on the PTA listservs, but it is at least in the thousands.  The PTAs don’t endorse candidates, but they have a large latent communication capacity to inform parents about the actions of politicians.  Accordingly, they are one of the great sleeping giants of county politics.

Perhaps the number one issue for the PTAs is school construction.  Last year, they strongly supported a recordation tax increase proposed by Council Member Nancy Floreen that was marketed at the time as being mostly intended to pay for more schools.  The size of that tax hike (roughly $200 million over six years) is close to the size of the present cut in GO bond issuances ($180 million over six years).  That suggests that the tax hike will be at least partially supplanted and – after capital money is moved around – will now be effectively used to reduce future debt service, not to finance additional school construction as the council promised.  That is not going over well with the PTAs.

The Realtors

The Realtors are one of the most active political players in the county, especially inside the business community.  They spent $45,000 on direct contributions to county-level candidates in the 2014 cycle – including to County Executive Leggett and eight winning council candidates – and spent tens of thousands more on mailers promoting their endorsees.  Nonetheless, they were targeted by the recordation tax increase and fiercely resisted it.  If the increase were marketed as paying down debt service, which now could be the case through the backdoor, the PTAs would never have come out to support it and it would probably have died.  Now the rationale used to defeat the Realtors – school construction – has been put in question by subsequent action of the council.

The PTAs and the Realtors may have disagreed about the recordation tax hike, but they may now both see it alongside the GO bond cut as a bait and switch.  One big group got a tax increase it didn’t want.  The other big group may not get the spending increase it did want.  Neither group is happy.

So here’s the question.  What happens next?

Share
schools, transportation

When You’re In a Deep Hole

By Gaithersburg City Council Member Neil Harris.

In a recent meeting with the capital improvements team at MCPS, I suggested that it would take $1 billion in extra capital funding to provide enough classrooms and to fix dilapidated schools. The staff responded that the number was more like $2 billion or more. Ouch.

My guess was based on the basic cost for classroom space of $40K per student. So, an elementary school for 750 kids would cost $30 million. And we have 9,000 kids in portables ($360 million worth of classrooms) and we’re adding 2,500 new students each year ($100 million). I guessed at double that for renovations, but apparently that number is way worse than my rough guess.

In transportation, the situation is even worse. Not only is our system the most congested in the country, but in 25 years the congestion is projected to be 72% worse! In the past 15 years, we’ve added several hundred thousand new residents to the mid- and up-county, and the population will grow by 20%. We’re not keeping up.

The National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board (TPB) made projections based on the regional long-range plan, which includes all the projects proposed and expected to be funded. The TPB recently looked at the 500 projects proposed but not expected to be funded, and building all of them “only” makes congestion 28% worse. I repeat: building every project proposed still makes congestion 28% worse!

One problem for the TPB is that the projects on their list are proposed by local jurisdictions: the states, counties, and cities, and are most often focused on local needs. There is no central authority over regionally significant ideas that will serve to improve transportation for everyone.

Another challenge is that there is such a huge focus on new transit that it crowds out roads. If you build a new Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) on a Metro Station and 60% of the new residents use Metro, then there are still 40% of the new residents in cars. One mode is not enough, and the current plans look like they are out of balance, with the vast majority of trips by auto in 25 years but most funding going to transit and not highways. To be clear: in 25 years with $100 billion spent on transit in our region, we increase ridership by 2% for work trips, with a huge increase in auto trips and little improvement in our road network.

The TPB bravely took it upon ourselves to develop a list of 10 “potentially game changing” projects, programs, and policies to study, to learn if there are ways to actually reduce congestion instead of surrendering to it. This has been a controversial process thanks to inclusion of a new northern Potomac crossing, but the TPB has recognized that desperate times require desperate measures.

So, where would the money come from to fix these problems, assuming we find good answers and the political will to address them?

For transportation, Northern Virginia has taken the lead. The Northern Virginia Transportation Authority collects a small surcharge on some taxes to create $330 million in new funding to reduce congestion. Under this new program, the state and the local jurisdictions are not allowed to reduce transportation funding, so the money goes directly to new programs.

For schools as well as transportation, Adam Pagnucco suggested that Montgomery County’s annual revenue grows by about $140 million each year due to increased income and property tax revenue. How about dedicating all this growth to infrastructure for the next few years, instead of operations? In five years or so, we could be all caught up.

These aren’t the only ways to get out of the hole. We could build schools like the Monarch Global Academy in Laurel, which cost one-third to one-half what MCPS spends on each school. That would stretch our dollars. We could look at the cost-effectiveness of transportation projects already in the pipeline and refocus on ones that make more of a difference.

I hope with the big election year in Montgomery County next year, we can direct the candidates to solve these big challenges as their top priority. We need to understand what projects will actually help and then find ways to pay for them.

Whatever we do, we know one thing – when you are in a hole, first stop digging.

Neil Harris is Vice President of the Gaithersburg City Council and a voting member of the Transportation Planning Board and TPB’s Long Range Plan Task Force.

Share
Adam Pagnucco, Montgomery County Public Schools, schools

Five Facts About MoCo School Construction Funding

By Adam Pagnucco.

School construction has been one of the hottest issues for years in Montgomery County.  Enrollment in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) has been increasing by close to 2,000 students a year for a decade with no sign of stabilizing.  The result is crowded schools throughout the county.

According to the Superintendent’s FY18 Recommended Capital Budget, 109 of MCPS’s 197 schools were over capacity in the 2016-2017 school year.  Of those, 35 had enrollments of at least 120% of their capacity.  Even if the Superintendent’s request is fully funded, by the 2022-2023 school year, 87 schools will be over capacity and 29 will be at least 120% capacity.  Overcrowding will continue because construction will not keep pace with enrollment, which is projected to grow by nearly 10,000 students over that period.  MCPS is using 388 relocatable classrooms this year, a number that has not changed much over the last five years despite significant spending on school construction.

Over 80 percent of MCPS school construction costs are paid by county taxpayers with the remainder coming from state aid.  Here are five facts about school construction that all MoCo residents should know.

  1. MCPS enrollment is growing faster than the rest of the state COMBINED.

According to the Maryland State Department of Education, September enrollment in MCPS grew by 15,036 students between 2005 and 2014.  Over that period, public school enrollment in the rest of Maryland SHRANK by 543 students.  MCPS’s absolute increase and its growth rate (11%) were both first in the state.  Other systems are growing too (notably Howard and Anne Arundel) and all counties have maintenance requirements.  But in terms of new capacity needs, MCPS is in a category of one.

  1. MoCo gets less school construction money from the state per student than all but a handful of other counties.

Over the five-year FY13-17 period, MoCo received $201.7 million in state aid for school construction, just ahead of Baltimore County and tops in the state.  That’s a substantial amount of money.  But relative to its September 2014 enrollment, MoCo’s construction aid per student ($1,306) ranked 18th of 24 jurisdictions.  MoCo had 18% of the state’s public school students but received just 13% of state construction dollars, the biggest gap in the state.

  1. The state’s funding formula discriminates against school construction in MoCo.

The state finances a percentage of eligible costs for school construction projects approved for state aid with the local jurisdiction paying the rest.  MoCo is one of seven jurisdictions for which the state covers 50% of funding for school projects approved by the Board of Public Works, the lowest rate available.  Other jurisdictions including Prince George’s (63%) and Baltimore City (93%) receive much higher cost splits.

  1. State legislators from the City of Baltimore extracted a billion dollars from the state for their school construction program.

In 2013, Governor Martin O’Malley and the General Assembly’s presiding officers made passing a revenue increase for transportation a high priority.  Despite the fact that one of the projects to be funded was Baltimore’s $2.9 billion light-rail Red Line, city legislators withheld their votes until they got more money to rebuild their aging schools.  (City school enrollment fell between 2005 and 2014.)  The result was a new seven-year billion-dollar state aid program for city schools that greased the wheels for the transportation funding hike.  The city delegation’s work shows that significant progress can be made on this issue.

  1. MoCo residents are now paying a new tax hike in part to fund school construction.

Last May, the Montgomery County Council approved a recordation tax increase on home sales projected to raise $196 million over six years.  The council justified the tax hike on the grounds that $125 million of the money was supposed to be spent on school construction.  No recent media reports indicate that any other Maryland county has raised local taxes for the explicit purpose of financing school construction.

Disclosure: Your author’s son attends Flora Singer Elementary School in Silver Spring.  Despite opening just four years ago to relieve overcrowding at nearby Oakland Terrace, the school is already over capacity.

Share
schools

Senate Votes $15 Million in Private School Vouchers

The Maryland Senate tacked in a conservative direction last week when it voted 25-18 to allow corporations to write off their taxes 60% of donations to authorized private school voucher programs. The Department of Commerce can award up to $15 million in credits to qualifying businesses per year.

The Department of Legislative Services estimates that it will cost an additional $140,355 to implement the program and then $108,400 annually to administer it beyond the ongoing $15 million in revenue lost to the State’s General Fund.

Democrats Split

All Senate Republicans voted for the bill. Among Democrats, 19 voted against the bill while 11 supported the legislation. Democrats who voted for the bill are:

Miller (D-27, Prince George’s, Charles and Calvert)
Astle (D-30, Anne Arundel)
Brochin (D-42, Baltimore County)
Currie (D-25, Prince George’s)
DeGrange (D-32, Anne Arundel)
Mathias (D-38, Somerset, Worcester and Wicomico)
McFadden (D-45, Baltimore City)
Middleton (D-28, Charles)
Muse (D-26, Prince George’s)
Peters (D-23, Prince George’s)
Zirkin (D-11, Baltimore County)

The bill is supported by Governor Larry Hogan and Senate President Mike Miller. The Maryland State Education Association (MSEA) strongly opposes it.

Who Will Get the Extra Funding?

The short answer is not the public schools. MSEA also points out that the program allows corporations, rather than parents or school boards, to decide which schools get the donations. It remains unclear whether the money will allow more poor kids to attend private schools, as advocates claim, or help subsidize kids who already attend them at the expense of public schools.

At this point, the bill’s fate is up to the House of Delegates.

 

Share
MCPS, Montgomery County Council, schools

PTA, MCPS Place Leventhal in Time-Out

MoCoCouncil

Montgomery County Council President George Leventhal has been pressing very hard for the Council to approve $31 million for needed upgrades to the County Council office building.

Reaction by MCCPTA Leaders

PTA members were not jumping for joy at the prospect in light of MCPS’s severe school construction needs. Cheryl Peirce, Chair of the Montgomery County Council of Parent-Teacher Associations (MCCPTA) Capital Improvements Program (CIP) Committee, sent out one alert regarding the proposal:

In light of our recent testimony to the County Council on February 24th for funding for our school buildings and systems, as well as efforts we (MCCPTA, MCPS, County Council, state delegation) have undertaken this year and last in Annapolis, a decision to consider a $30M+ renovation of the County Council offices has raised questions among Board of Education members and many MCCPTA leaders.

Other online critics have been less diplomatic, suggesting that the Council can use portables.

Reaction from the School Board and the County Exec

As Bill Turque reported in the Washington Post, School Board Member Pat O’Neill had already expressed opposition to the proposal:

“We have 9,300 children in [classroom trailers],” O’Neill said. “We have children sitting in some classrooms with coats on” because of poor heating systems.

County Executive Ike Leggett opposed the plan and did not include the funds in the budget he submitted to the Council.

Leventhal on Critics

Leventhal punched back hard:

“In the school system’s view, 100 percent of the budget should be available for school construction,” he said. “Their plan is that any available dollar should go to school construction.”

Earlier comments–that seemingly include colleagues who failed to line up behind the plan–expressed equal regard for opponents:

Leventhal, with some sarcasm, said the council could elect to “remain in this outmoded, falling-apart decrepit building forever.”

On Tuesday night, Bill Turque reported that the renovation plan had been “set aside.”

My Take

Leventhal is absolutely right that the council building needs renovation. The heating and A/C are terrible–you really don’t want an office on the sunny side in summer. It may even be, as George said, “odiferous,” though I’ve never noticed it on my visits.

But it ultimately is a question of priorities. Thousands of students are learning in portables and school buildings also have similar problems with the heating and the A/C. Our new governor does not seem real keen on funding school construction, so the County cannot depend on money raining down from the State.

George Leventhal is not a happy person today. Fortunately, both MCCPTA and MCPS have lots of experience in handling ill-tempered people of all ages. The effectiveness of both organizations during this episode signals that neither should be ignored over the next four years.

Share