With growth comes growing pains — and questions surrounding how Washington-area school districts will handle the thousands of extra students flooding their halls each year.

Portable classrooms and extra teachers are always options. But in Maryland, where a newly tightened state law requires counties to maintain or increase their per-pupil funding for their school systems, more students mean the budget squeeze is on. And as the states shift teacher pension costs to the counties, more educators mean more expensive employees beyond the usual salaries.