Montgomery County schools officials are projecting an enrollment jump of 10,000 students by 2016, but don’t know how to find the space or the funds for the imminent boom.
Elementary schools are expected to get hit the hardest, with an additional 5,568 students, while middle schools will fit almost 4,000 more students. High school enrollment should increase by only 454 at first.
In the past three years, total enrollment has increased by about 6,300 students.
“Your most immediate, pressing problem is elementary space in the next 10 years,” outgoing Superintendent Jerry Weast told the school board Tuesday. He recommended that eight new elementary schools be built.
Board member Laura Berthiaume replied, “Which we couldn’t possibly build in the next six years.”
Weast answered: “It’s going to be a challenge.”
As the school board begins to plan for fiscal 2012, its members expressed concerns that the Montgomery County Council would ignore rising enrollment when approving the budget.
At a recent lunch, the council told the school board it would not increase the schools’ current operating budget of about $2.2 billion — a $97 million cut from fiscal 2010, which the board had threatened to sue over.
The school system’s budget has increased by more than 75 percent in the last decade, taking up 57 percent of the county’s operating budget.
School board President Patricia O’Neill said agreeing on an operating budget would be more challenging than lobbying for state money because “anyone who thinks we can get away with less [funding] is smoking something.”
Space was also a concern: “We’ll probably have to move back in some portables,” Weast said. “We’re already in a space deficit right now, and there’s only so much you can build at one time.”
O’Neill suggested reclaiming public school property leased to private facilities, such as an assisted-living facility.
“I have battle scars from moving people out in my 12 years to reclaim these properties,” O’Neill said, remembering a protest when the board reclaimed Newport Mill Middle School from a private school.
Board member Christopher Barclay said he was puzzled over how the board could accommodate the new students without an increased budget to develop new spaces.
“Folks can complain or cry or call us greedy, but we get that percent of the budget because we get these young people,” Barclay said. “The cost isn’t going down. I wish I had the answers, but we’re going to have to deal with that.”
