School board wants to keep Peary property

Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2005

The county Board of Education unanimously passed a resolution on Tuesday opposing the sale of the former Peary High School property to the Melvin J. Berman Hebrew Academy.

The resolution marks another setback for the Hebrew Academy, which is trying to buy the 19.5-acre Aspen Hill property it occupies. Last month, the Planning Board also voted to oppose the purchase.

The school board resolution will be forwarded to the County Council’s Management and Fiscal Policy Committee, which is scheduled to consider the academy’s bid on Oct. 17.

‘‘I don’t want to dispose of it,” Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Jerry D. Weast said, referring to the property. ‘‘If they want to utilize it in a long-term lease, that’s fine, but I don’t want to lose it from our inventory.”

The Hebrew Academy, which rents the property from the county for $60,000 per year, is seeking to exercise a clause in a long-term lease agreement entered into in 1996 and buy the parcel for $1.5 million. Under the proposal, the county would have the option to repurchase the property beginning in 2026.

Over the years, the school board has taken different stances on turning over property that cannot be used as school sites, Weast said. He alluded to 1.75 acres between Edson Lane and Tilden Middle School in North Bethesda that the school system turned over to the county last year.

Some parents said the school system should not relinquish any land in its possession. But school planners said the North Bethesda land was reserved for a driveway that is no longer needed.

Weast cautioned that the school system cannot afford to lose land that is the size of the Peary property.

‘‘I am not inclined in this kind of housing market to get rid of this property given the horrific circumstances we found ourselves in when you asked me to bring back Belt when I first started,” Weast said, referring to the former Col. Joseph M. Belt Middle School in Wheaton, which reopened this year as A. Mario Loiederman Middle School. ‘‘Because it was so far gone we couldn’t even see it in our rearview mirror.”

Richard G. Hawes, the school system’s facilities director, said, ‘‘A lot of things have changed since 1994 when this property was surplused to the county government.”

By that time, the site had sat vacant for roughly a decade, drawing ire from Aspen Hill residents concerned the property was being used by vagrants and troublemakers.

Now, Hawes said, the county may need another high school in the John F. Kennedy Cluster. A possible site off of Layhill Road, where the school system hoped to share land with a proposed community center, may not be suitable for building due to concerns about wetlands there, he said.

If the county were to reacquire Peary for public use it would have to reimburse the Hebrew Academy for any improvements it made to the property, Hawes said.

‘‘We have no problem with that,” Weast said. ‘‘It’s the land under these things that is our primary concern. Then the building is our secondary concern.”

Since the Hebrew Academy occupied the property, it has spent more than $10 million renovating the 200,000-square-foot building, academy spokeswoman Ilene France had said in March.

School board member Valerie Ervin was critical of the $1.5 million purchase price. That amounts to ‘‘a wing and a prayer in this housing market,” she said.