Max Smith, wtop.com
KENSINGTON, Md. – A new middle school is needed in the Bethesda-Chevy Chase area — that much the area can agree on. But where to put it has been another story.
Now Montgomery County Schools Superintendent Joshua Starr says the site selection process is going to start all over again.
Earlier this year, before Starr started as superintendent, the school board chose Rock Creek Hills Park in Kensington as the spot where they wanted to build a new middle school, designed to relieve overcrowding in current classrooms.
But at a meeting this week, Starr asked the board to reconsider based on concerns raised by the community about both the viability of the site, and the process that led to choosing it.
“We’re thankful to the superintendent for hitting the reset button,” says Jim Pekar, who spearheaded the community campaign to put the school elsewhere.
Rock Creek Hills Park sits on the former site of Kensington Junior High School, which made the board think it could be transferred back into their control more easily.
Now it appears the school system could face legal trouble if it tries to build there because money used to turn the old school into the park came with some restrictions on changing it back.
But since that money was accepted by the Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission, rather than the school system, it’s not clear whether that would impact the school system’s ability to reclaim the parkland. Starr says they are looking into it.
Pekar says either way, he doesn’t think that Rock Creek Hills Park is the place for a new school because of its value to the community, and the lack of wide roads and sidewalks that lead to it.
“It serves as the heart of the Rock Creek Hills neighborhood, it serves as the green setting for the Kensington Park retirement community that stands on much of the footprint of the former Kensington Junior High School, and it has two regulation soccer fields that are very scarce here in the down county area,” says Pekar.
Starr says even with the time it will take to go through the site selection process again, he hopes the new school will open, somewhere, in Fall 2017.
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