Bad news for housing developers this year meant a small bit of relief for Montgomery County schools as enrollment numbers in the fastest-growing suburbs fell below expectations.
Over the past several years, the school system has had to funnel resources into booming towns like Clarksburg, where developers have built or are planning to build hundreds of new homes. The district has responded with plans for pricey new school buildings and an influx of teachers.
This year, though, Clarksburg Elementary had 69 fewer students than expected. Several miles away, Cedar Grove Elementary had 65 fewer than expected. Nearby Little Bennett Elementary, where most of the past growth has been concentrated, fell 47 students short of expectations.
“It’s somewhat good news,” said Bruce Crispell, the district’s senior planner. Because of the lower numbers, Crispell said fewer students would be affected by boundary changes to take effect next fall upon the opening of a new school in Clarksburg.
For the past two years, the district and area parents have gone back and forth trying to determine where schools belong and who should attend them, based largely on growth projections made before the economy’s downturn.
Chris McDermott, a Parent-Teacher Association parent at Little Bennett Elementary, said the most important factor has been stabilizing the boundaries so that kids who moved into the school when it opened in 2006 won’t have to turn around and move to another school next year.
Superintendent Jerry Weast’s plan for the boundaries, released last week, make the best of a challenging puzzle, McDermott said.
At Clarksburg Elementary, however, PTA President Crystal Crigger worries underenrollment will have negative effects on classroom size.
“The concern I have,” Crigger said by e-mail, “is if we drop enrollment we will lose valuable staff and our class sizes will be huge.” She explained the school now has 16-20 students per class, but she worries it could jump if low enrollment dictates trimming teachers.
Elsewhere in the 140,000-student district, enrollment unexpectedly jumped by 1,600 students. Officials attribute that rise to fewer people moving outside of the county and more families opting for public school over private.
“The only part of the county that didn’t see unexpected growth was in Clarksburg,” Crispell said. “But this is more of a respite, not a long-term pattern.”
