Board recommends Kendale Road site for Seven Locks

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

After three months of political wrangling and public hearings, the county school board on Tuesday voted to build a new Seven Locks Elementary School for 640 students at Kendale Road in Potomac, the same location it approved for the school a year-and-a-half ago.

The board voted 5-2 to approve a resolution that also calls for the existing Seven Locks Elementary School to be used as a holding facility for schools displaced by construction projects or for administrative offices for school staff working in the Potomac area.

Board members Valerie Ervin (Dist. 4) and Nancy Navarro (Dist. 5), both of Silver Spring, voted against the plan. Sebastian Johnson supported the resolution, but the student member’s vote does not count on budget items.

The County Council’s Education Committee will discuss options for Seven Locks today. The committee is expected to make a recommendation to the full County Council, which will discuss the project as part of a budget worksession on Thursday.

County Council President George L. Leventhal (D-At large) of Takoma Park said last month that the council does not support building on Kendale Road.

With the council controlling the money, some said the project could be headed for a stalemate.

Councilman Howard A. Denis (R-Dist. 1) of Chevy Chase, who sits on the Education Committee, is pushing a plan to rebuild the school on its existing site, a proposal board President Charles Haughey said he cannot support.

‘‘I could not, in good conscience, see a larger school built on the site that current serves a very small elementary school,” said Haughey (At large) of Rockville. ‘‘Therefore I cannot vote for a solution on the existing Seven Locks site.”

County Councilman Michael L. Subin, chairman of the council’s Education Committee, said he does not support Denis’s proposal.

‘‘My reading on this is it leads to a political stalemate and the kids lose,” said Subin (D-At large) of Gaithersburg.

Sandy Vogelgesang, who heads the Seven Locks Coalition, which comprises eight neighborhood associations that support Denis’s proposal, said that even though the board supported the Kendale site, she is confident the council will not.

‘‘I know it’s solid ...,” she said following the board’s vote. ‘‘George Leventhal and others have said for two weeks that we have a minimum six [votes against Kendale] and may have more.”

Superintendent Jerry D. Weast spoke for 25 minutes Tuesday before formally introducing the resolution, repeatedly stressing that the board had listened to community concerns.

He cited the plan to use the existing Seven Locks building as a holding school or as administrative offices for staff, such as school psychologists or staff development teachers who work in the Churchill cluster.

‘‘We thought that with that solution ... we would be sending a message to the community that we hear you,” Weast said. ‘‘You didn’t want to surplus it and you wanted us to use it for a school purpose.”

The board chose the Kendale Road site for a new school in November 2004 and has already spent $750,000 on site planning and design.

On Feb. 15, county Inspector General Thomas J. Dagley released a report questioning how that the decision was made. The report eventually led to a joint task force of County Council staff and school planners who developed eight possible options for Seven Locks.

It also led to public hearings at the board and at the County Council where almost all of the speakers opposed the Kendale Road option and where parents from other Churchill cluster schools called for a Seven Locks solution that also could benefit their schools.

Board member Stephen N. Abrams said the board needed to do a ‘‘qualitative not quantitative” review of public comments.

‘‘The fact that an overwhelming number of speakers come out on one side of an issue doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re right,” said Abrams (Dist. 2) of Rockville.

Ervin said her vote opposing the plan was ‘‘not a vote on one school. It’s a vote on process. It’s a vote on our relationship with the community, how well we listen.”

She added, ‘‘We pitted community against community, which I think is very sad.”

The board’s resolution acknowledged overcrowding concerns voiced by parents at other schools in the Churchill cluster.

It states that ‘‘Bells Mill Elementary School is currently the most heavily impacted school in the cluster” and ‘‘can be provided relief as soon as possible if the council accelerates their modernization by one year” to a completion date of August 2009.

The resolution also states, ‘‘Potomac Elementary School has overcrowding and internal building deficits and must be included in the Churchill cluster solution.”

Diana Conway, incoming PTA president at Potomac Elementary School, said she hopes the vote finally moves the controversy toward a conclusion.

‘‘We’re tired, we want relief,” Conway said in a telephone interview after the hearing. ‘‘We’re hoping for leadership from our elected officials to move this process forward. We don’t want to see a stalemate where kids sit in moldy portables or in deficient, 70-year-old buildings. We want this to end.”