After-school pedestrian safety under scrutiny after death and multiple child injuries
Since the October 2025 death of 11-year-old sixth-grader Summer Lim, near Earle B. Wood Middle School in Rockville, a previously unreported traffic incident has come to light. Now, a third student has been injured near school grounds. Are two new stop signs enough to keep our children safe? MCM News asked a traffic safety expert to provide insights...
For my soccer teammates and me, this joke has become all too colloquial at every home game. But as we waited two months for Whitman’s new turf field to open last fall, did we expect to be cracking that joke multiple times per game? Definitely not.
The turf field was supposed to be state-of-the-art, made with a different material than older turf fields with “cancerous” black pellets at schools like Walter Johnson and Wootton. Whitman isn’t the only school that has this type of turf field; B–CC, Wheaton, Richard Montgomery and Einstein all have relatively similar surfaces...
...MCPS officials recently testedWhitman’s turf field and found that its surface is outside the FIFA range for the degree of friction and “too smooth” for FIFA standards — leading to athletes slipping, sometimes resulting in injuries. FIFA is the international organization that makes rules for soccer, whether for the World Cup final or a youth soccer game. I understand the “smooth” standards may be different for soccer than for other sports that play on the turf field, but I also know that other athletes still slip and fall on the surface of the field too.
Also, when it’s hot and humid outside, dust from the sand in the turf rises in the air. There’s a potentially toxic chemical called silica in the infill of the field, which rises from the turf surface. Symptoms of silica poisoning include shortness of breath, coughing and rapid breathing...
On Richard Montgomery High School’s Artificial Turf
Good evening members of the Board of Education and Superintendent Smith. You may remember at the CIP hearings in November a student from Richard
Montgomery who plays on the soccer team as a goalie, Molly Winchenbach. She
testified about the unusual abrasiveness of RM’s new artificial turf field and the
resulting injuries suffered by student athletes. She is my daughter. She would be
here tonight to give you this update and make this plea herself, but she is at practice. High school athletes never seem to have a season off these days.
To MCPS’s credit, after Molly’s testimony, they sent out samples of RM’s and Whitman’s artificial turf for independent testing to a lab in Canada. Both
fields had been installed at the same time using the same organic Zeofill rock/sand mix but their effect on the athletes was drastically different with RM’s field causing substantially more serious abrasion injuries. That different experience of
the athletes was confirmed by the objective tests. Although in my meeting with the Director of Construction and Director of Athletics back in February to go over the results of the tests, I was not permitted to keep a copy, I wrote down the pertinent
results right after the meeting, so my numbers are within a few points. There was agreement in the room that the results were shocking. The abrasiveness of the field
was measured against FIFA’s standard of 30.
Old crumb rubber fields tested a 3.
Whitman’s field tested a 20. RM’s field tested 128! Four times the FIFA standard! The lab tests also figured out why – the volcanic rock particles used in the RM field Zeofill were much larger than those used at Whitman, and at RM, the rock was layered with the sand like a cake, rather than all mixed together, as it was at Whitman.
Now that MCPS has verified what we have been saying all along – there is
something very wrong with the RM turf – it is so abrasive, it is tearing the skin off the athletes, what are you going to do about it? MCPS thought that perhaps they
had solved the problem for this spring. They had removed some of the fill and
tried to mix up the layers more by deep tining it. The plan then was to just replace
the offending larger particle fill with the smaller particle fill gradually with regular
monthly maintenance. But, I’m here to tell you, on behalf of my daughter and the
other student athletes who are using and will be using this field in the fall
regularly, that MCPS’s remediation plan is not aggressive enough. I’ve provided
you with a picture of what happened to Molly’s leg the first time she slid on the
turf this spring to stop a ball coming into the goal. The RM turf scraped off the top layer of about 6 inches of her skin. This cannot be the conditions under which you
expect student athletes to play. While all athletes may not experience the
abrasiveness of the RM field the same, it is particularly damaging to the students,
like Molly in positions, like goalie, who have to slide on the turf all the time. She
plays on turf all over the county, both indoor and outdoor, and only receives
serious injuries like this from the RM turf.
I understand that MCPS is in the process of asking the manufacturer of the
turf how much it will cost to replace all or most of the fill in RM’s turf all at once
over the summer. I am asking you to ensure this remediation gets done
immediately. (And any cost should not come out of CIP funds already allocated
to capital expenditures for RM, which needs substantial expansion over the
summer just to keep up with its ever growing student population.) You owe it to
the students whose health and safety you say are your top priority. You now know this turf is 4x the standard for abrasiveness, you know the reasons why it is so abrasive, and you know what you need to do to fix it. Don’t waste anymore time while more students get hurt. Do it now.
Thank you.
The boy’s mother, Bertha Forgwei, of Silver Spring, said her son became scared after he left the bus at the wrong Aspen Hill stop in October 2015 and began to run after the bus as it pulled away, according to the lawsuit.
At the November 8, 2018, Montgomery County Board of Education public hearing on school facilities a Richard Montgomery High School student gave public comment about the injuries caused by the new artificial turf at the school. Watch her statement below.
The Board of Education calls this a "best practice."
The Board of Education used $562,721 of Operating Budget funds to pay for this artificial turf. That means they sacrificed teacher salaries to pay for this new field. They did not use Capital Budget (bricks and mortar) funds. There is no money available to replace this field again.
Students will need to buy more bandages.
