Update!! Exclusive Breaking News: Bowers Gives Away 61.25 Acres of MCPS School Land

UPDATE:

Is your local MCPS school overcrowded? Have you heard the Board of Education complain that they do not have any place to build more schools and that they can only build multi-level, overcrowded schools on too small lots?

Do you like being tricked?

Well Trick or Treat time is here, and the Parents' Coalition has heard that the Board of Education and Superintendent Larry Bowers have a big trick for parents this week!

The Trick is that without any public process or Board of Education public discussion or vote, Superintendent Larry Bowers is giving away 61.25 acres of open public school land.  

The Treat is that the land is being handed over to a no bid vendor.  

Where is this land located in the County?  It doesn't matter.  
Public school land is a valuable asset and its disposition should be discussed in public by the land owner, the Board of Education.  
The land could be used to build a school, it could be sold, or it could be traded.  The possibilities are endless, but, once again, usable public school land will disappear from the Board of Education inventory without any public process.  





We have seen over 176 acres of MCPS public school land lost since 1994.  

 
Say good-bye to another 61.25 acres this week and add it to the list of dedicated, public school land that was given in trust to the Montgomery County Public Schools Board of Education for the benefit of public school children, but not used for the educational benefit of our children.  

Happy Halloween!  

 

Exclusive Breaking News: Bowers Gives Away 18.5 Acres of MCPS School Land

PLEASE SEE UPDATE!

Is your local MCPS school overcrowded? Have you heard the Board of Education complain that they do not have any place to build more schools and that they can only build multi-level, overcrowded schools on too small lots?

Do you like being tricked?

Well Trick or Treat time is here, and the Parents' Coalition has heard that the Board of Education and Superintendent Larry Bowers have a big trick for parents this week!

The Trick is that without any public process or Board of Education public discussion or vote, Superintendent Larry Bowers is giving away 18.5 acres of open public school land.  

The Treat is that the land is being handed over to a no bid vendor.  

Where is this land located in the County?  It doesn't matter.  Public school land is a valuable asset and its disposition should be discussed in public by the land owner, the Board of Education.  The land could be used to build a school, it could be sold, or it could be traded.  The possibilities are endless, but, once again, usable public school land will disappear from the Board of Education inventory without any public process.  

We have seen over 176 acres of MCPS public school land lost since 1994.  
Say good-bye to another 18.5 acres this week and add it to the list of dedicated, public school land that was given in trust to the Montgomery County Public Schools Board of Education for the benefit of public school children, and not used for the educational benefit of our children.  

Happy Halloween!  

Exclusive Video: BOE Committee Discussion of BOE Property: Future School Sites and Surplus Land

MONTGOMERY COUNTY BOARD OF EDUCATION
Policy Committee 
May 10, 2013
1:00 pm
Room 120

Discussion of “Guidelines for Leasing, Licensing, or Using MCPS Property 
that is Being Held as a Future School Site.” (Policy DNA, Management of
Board of Education Property) – Judy Bresler/James Song/Bruce Crispell
(2:25) 20 minutes

BOE Committee meetings are held off camera.  The Parents' Coalition videotaped this discussion and is making it available to the public.

Patch: Council Land Deal Legislation Passes Too Late For Brickyard

The Montgomery County Council approved a bill that harnesses some of the county executive's power to make land deals. County Executive Ike Leggett has ten days to approve or veto the bill.

...Councilmembers Valerie Ervin, Nancy Floreen and Craig Rice opposed the proposal.
"This bill insults the integrity of executive branch staff by suggesting that the executive branch's work is not intended to serve the best interests of the county," they said in a joint statement...

---------------------------------------------

Over 70 acres of dedicated public school land that the current and past County Executive have turned over to private interests is listed below.  Meanwhile, Montgomery County Public School children are being educated in temporary trailers outside of their school buildings.  Is turning over public school land to private interests for pennies in the best interest of public school children? 

Peary High School

Montgomery Hills Junior High

Bradley Middle School site 

Brickyard Middle School site 

"MCPS should be part of the solution by keeping... acquisition of a private site or...its own land at the old Montgomery Hills Junior High School site and the old Lynnbrook Elementary School site

"...MCPS should be part of the solution by keeping on the table acquisition of a private site or repurposing existing private uses on some of its own land at the old Montgomery Hills Junior High School site and the old Lynnbrook Elementary School site..."

~Member of BCC Middle School Site Selection Committee from Parks Department.  Her full statement on the BCC Middle School Site Selection Process is below.

Minority Report: Farquhar

ABC7: Jerry Pasternak at center of debate to turn organic farm into soccer fields

Patch: Middle School Committee Whittles Down Options

Click link for full article:  At the first site-selection meeting, members eliminated 13 locations.

What do Crossway and MSI have in common?

Crossways Community has put in an application to run a Charter School out of a closed Montgomery County public school building. [Pleasant View Elementary School]


MSI Soccer is interested in leasing 20 acres of public school land and turning it into private soccer fields. [Brickyard Middle School site]


Both plans would take dedicated public school land out of the inventory of available land for Board of Education use. 


And in 2009, both organizations had the same lobbyist according to the Montgomery County Ethics Commission records.


Lobbyists 2009

Leggett Land Deals - 20 acre school site is just the start

On Friday, June 10, 2011 County Executive Ike Leggett was a guest on the The Politics Hour on the Kojo Nnamdi show on WAMU.  At the very end of the interview, Kojo Nnamdi asked Leggett a question about his take over of the 20 acre Brickyard Middle School site that Leggett took from the public school inventory of land.

The question had to do with the current tenant of the land, an organic farmer. Leggett responds that "we can place organic farm in a variety of places in Montgomery County."  What does County Executive Leggett mean by "we can place?"  What other land does Leggett have up his sleeve? If there is other land what about the land needs of public schools?  What other land deals is Leggett contemplating?

Ike Leggett on Kojo Nnamdi quote:

"We need more soccer fields and we need organic farm and I think we could get both. We can place organic farm in a variety of places in Montgomery County and I think we have some options that we would like to exercise to include that. So that's the plan that we are looking at now and I think we can achieve both."

Conservation Montgomery: Site Selection without Early Community Involvement is Flawed

Conservation Montgomery calls for the Board of Education to prevent the social injustice that would occur from building a school on the Rosemary Hills-Lyttonsville Park. 
Conservation Montgomery reminds the Board that a logical place for a new middle school would be the site of the former Montgomery Hills Junior High School, just 5 minutes from the  Rosemary Hills-Lyttonsville community.  Their full letter to the Board of Education is below:Conservation Montgomery

Park is Small Oasis for Historic Minority and Low Income Community

Save Our Park, Preserve Our Community Coalition

For Immediate Release
April 18, 2011
Contact: Susan Buchanan

New Bethesda-Chevy Chase Cluster Middle School to
Displace Silver Spring Neighborhood Park
Park is Small Oasis for Historic Minority and Low Income Community

COMMUNITY MEETING THIS THURSDAY

An emergency Town Hall has been scheduled for Thursday, April 21 at 7 pm, hosted by the surrounding neighborhood associations. Reporters are invited and encouraged to attend. Coalition members will be available for interviews before and after the meeting outside the door of the meeting room.

Location: Coffield Community Center, 2nd Floor, 2450 Lyttonsville Road, Silver Spring, Md, 20910.

Silver Spring, Md. – On April 28, the Montgomery County Board of Education (BOE) will vote whether to approve Rosemary Hills/Lyttonsville Park in Silver Spring, Md., as the site of a new middle school for the Bethesda-Chevy Chase cluster. Currently, students who matriculate into Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School attend Westland Middle School in Bethesda, Md.

At the request of Superintendent Jerry Weast, a Site Selection Advisory Committee, exclusive of representation from the Rosemary Hills/Lyttonsville community, worked in secrecy to evaluate 10 potential sites for the new school. Without consideration of impacts to the local community and with little analysis, the committee selected Rosemary Hills/Lyttonsville Park and forwarded its recommendation to the BOE for consideration. Montgomery County Public Schools released the committee's report last week, only after pressure from the community.The park is an integrated part of long-term planning for this historic minority and working-class neighborhood, once owned by Samuel Lytton, a freed slave and having been part of the Underground Railroad. Montgomery County received State funding under the Maryland Open Spaces Program in 2000 to acquire land for the park. It provides a much-needed environmental offset for the area, which is bordered by traffic congestion on East-West Highway, a large industrial park, the county bus depot and the Walter Reed Annex. The planned purple line will bring yet more development, with a maintenance depot and station directly across from the park. Amid all this development, it will be devastating to the community to lose its only green space to a middle school.

The site selection process was deeply flawed, and the final report omits key data the Board of Education would need to make an educated decision on the 28th. More thoughtful analysis shows that this site in fact meets few if any of the required criteria for a suitable school location (fact sheet shown below). The advisory committee inconsistently applied site selection criteria to produce the selection of Rosemary Hills/Lyttonsville Park as the recommended site. Also, the communities bordering the park were left out of the site selection process. Representatives of several towns and municipalities in Bethesda and Chevy Chase were invited to participate in the process, but no one from the town of Silver Spring was invited.
A coalition of concerned residents in the Silver Spring neighborhoods surrounding the park are calling on the BOE to reject the recommendation of the Site Selection Advisory Committee, to re-evaluate candidate sites fairly with consistent application of the stated selection criteria, to include community impact as an important criterion for site selection, and to move forward with transparency and community engagement.

Note: Because the community is divided on the issue of the middle school, with most residents on the fence pending further details from Montgomery County Public Schools, the neighborhood associations are not taking a position. The "Save Our Park, Preserve Our Community" coalition is a large and growing group of community residents advocating to build the new middle school in a more suitable location after more thorough and thoughtful analysis and discussion. 

### 

Site Selection Report:  http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/planning/pdf/BCC_MS2_SiteSelectionFinalReport.pdf 

History of Lyttonsville as Historically Black Community (click through the links): http://silverspringspeaks.blogspot.com/2011/03/lyttonsville-living-history-hidden-in.html

 Save Our Park, Preserve Our Community Coalition

Answer: 10,000 Students & Ike Leggett

Those are the answers to the following questions:

1.  About how many public school students are still being educated in classroom trailers outside of their school buildings? 10,000 +*


2.  Who is the County official that is now working on moving 20 acres of public school land away from the inventory of the public school system?  
County Executive Ike Leggett


What is unknown is why?  Pictured is a classroom trailer at Bethesda Elementary School.


If this 20 acres of public school land is taken away from the public school system that will make 39.5 acres of public school land that the County Executive has moved away from the uses of public school children in just the last 6 months.  


Both times the deals were kept quiet by the County Executive's office until the very last minute. No time for countywide PTAs to react. In the case of the land sale in December the Board of Education did object.  But that objection was ignored by the County Executive's office.    


Here's the list of schools where classroom trailers are being utilized this school year.  Source is the MCPS Capital Budget. 


*This estimate doesn't include the students that are in classroom trailers at holding schools or during construction projects.  That would be about another 3,000 students +/-.

CIP12_Appendix_D

NBC 4 reports on Leggett's removal of land from school system inventory

With this transaction, County Executive Ike Leggett and former County Executive Doug Duncan will have moved the use of over 160 acres of public school land from the school system to private interests. 


This is not about the kids, its about the developers.  The kids are still in classroom trailers outside of their school buildings. 


NBC 4 VIDEO AT THIS LINK

178.66 acres of school land declared surplus since 1994

For your information, here is a listing of MCPS school sites that have been declared surplus by the Board of Education.  


The yellow highlighted properties were declared surplus since 1994.

Click on the image to enlarge the text.

"another example of less-than-transparent wheeling and dealing"

To: boe@mcpsmd.org
Cc: "county council" <county.council@montgomerycountymd.gov>, ocemail@montgomerycountymd.gov
Sent: Wednesday, March 9, 2011 6:03:29 PM

Subject: Nick's Organic Farm

To the members of the Board of Education:

I am writing to express my dismay both with the decision regarding the lease on Nick's Organic Farm in Potomac and with the process by which the decision was made.

I am a professor who teaches (among other things) the history of agriculture and sustainable farming at Georgetown, as well as a former resident of Montgomery County and an avid customer and fan of Nick
Maravel, one of the real gems in the regional sustainable farming community. I brought students to Nick's Buckeystown farm last semester and they were in awe of his deep knowledge and experience of farming.

The decision to use this land, farmed organically for 30 years (as far as I know, unparalleled in the DC area and a major achievement), for sports fields is a short-sighted one that will detract from the community. I have school-aged children who play soccer; I understand the value of and need for sports fields. But there are more and less appropriate places for them when they are needed. I would wager that in its soil fertility, biodiversity, and overall ecological health, this land is now unlike any other single parcel of land within a 50-mile radius of DC. It will be murdered within two years of its conversion to sports fields - three decades of irreplaceable work undone in a moment.

So the Board has just committed what is basically an environmental crime. But in addition, the public comment period was outrageously short. This feels like a rushed process, not one designed to truly
solicit public input and to involve the community in decisions about how its resources are used.

There is, sadly, precedent for this. I used to be a resident of North Woodside and the handling of the old middle school, which was leased to Yeshiva for 99 years at fire-sale prices (in a neighborhood where the
population of children was rapidly growing) was another example of less-than-transparent wheeling and dealing that basically ignored community input and permanently appropriated (for all intents and
purposes) a valuable community resource in the interests of short-term solutions. It's a pity that in the eight or so years since that debacle played out, things haven't changed much in Montgomery County.
Nick's Potomac Farm is an irreplaceable gem for the local community, the sustainable farming community, people who enjoy buying local and humanely raised food, and a national community of farmers struggling to
find sources of certified organic seed. It's a shame that Montgomery County's school board didn't trouble itself to learn more about what remarkable things were taking place on that land before deciding to
terminate the lease with Nick Maravel. And shame on the members who voted to lease a public resource like this to the County for soccer fields without appropriate hearings and public debate.

Sincerely,
Meredith McKittrick