Bells Mill Elementary School needs help — now

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

The Bells Mill Elementary School building is decrepit, out-of-date, and overflowing by 150 children. The county’s solution is to place many of our students in portable classrooms, but these very portables have been making our children sick.

Fortunately, Montgomery County Public Schools and the County Council created a task force to work ‘‘on a new approach to alleviating school overcrowding in the elementary schools in the Churchill Cluster.” MCPS and the council also promised ‘‘to explore all options.”

Despite this promising mandate, Superintendent Jerry Weast recently issued his two recommendations based on the report by the task force: (1) to construct a building on the Kendale site and close Seven Locks or (2) to close Seven Locks and redistribute its students.

The task force could not possibly have taken a fair and rational look at the present needs of the schools in the cluster, because it did not even address the needs of Bells Mill. Of all the schools in the cluster, Bells Mill has, by far, the greatest overcrowding (49 percent), the neediest FACT score (the measure for prioritizing modernizations), and sick portables.

Despite all of this, MCPS says that Bells Mill must wait until 2010 to get relief in the form of a modernization. We simply cannot wait.

There is still time for the Board of Education and the County Council to do the right thing. Let’s hope they truly decide to make the biggest dent in the overcrowding in the Churchill Cluster by moving up Bells Mills’ modernization.

Richard Rosenthal and Laurie Halverson, Potomac

The writers are president and president-elect of the Bells Mill Elementary School PTA Executive Board. They are writing on behalf of the board.