4,057 Empty Seats: The Truth About MCPS Middle School Capacity #unusedClassrooms

Enrollment/Capacity/Utilization

If you watched the August 20, 2015, Board of Education discussion of the dire need for a new middle school to be built on a Kensington park site, you would think that MCPS middle schools were simply bursting at the seems. 

In fact, MCPS has approximately 4,000 unused, existing seats in middle schools today.   The image to the left highlights all of the MCPS middle schools with available classroom space. The actual available space varies depending on which MCPS chart you use.  

That's right, available middle school classroom space.

MCPS has so much empty middle school space that at Sligo Middle School they have given an entire wing of the school to a private company.  

Are Board of Education members simply unable to understand the basic math of classroom capacity?  

Let's take one set of MCPS numbers.

MCPS states that they have middle school classroom space to accommodate 36,315 middle school students.

Last year, MCPS enrolled 33,169 actual middle school students. 

Even using this set of MCPS numbers, there are still 3,146 EMPTY middle school classroom seats. 

That's at least the equivalent of THREE entire middle schools of empty classroom space.  

If you use the chart shown in the image above, there is the equivalent of FOUR entire middle schools of empty classroom space.