Planning Board Urges Consideration of Lynnbrook For New Middle School

Montgomery County Public Schools should take a serious look at siting a new Bethesda-Chevy Chase cluster middle school at the former Lynnbrook Elementary School and an adjacent local park in Bethesda, the county planning board has recommended.

The contentious debate over where to locate the new school in the overcrowded cluster came before the Montgomery County Planning Board for an advisory review Monday evening. The hearing followed a recommendation by Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning staff that rejected the findings of a site selection advisory committee, which as the best site for the new school.

The committee, convened by the school system and comprised of MCPS and Park and Planning staff along with a group of community stakeholders, evaluated 13 private and 25 public sites, some of them public parks. The committee was reconvened in January after an initial site selection process last year that drew fire from neighbors and officials who questioned MCPS's transparency and civic engagement.

Rock Creek Hills Local Park in Kensington emerged for a second time as the committee’s top school site in March, but the recommendation ran into stiff opposition from some community members, who argued the park provides important recreational opportunities for the community and wouldn’t serve as an adequate school site.

In an April 2 staff recommendation, planners argued that MCPS should pursue private sites for the new school, or consider Lynnbrook Park and the former Lynnbrook Elementary School or the former Montgomery Hills Junior High School site in Silver Spring. The loss of playing fields at Rock Creek Hills would pose a “significant loss of recreation opportunities, in addition to the environmental costs associated with loss of forest,” the report read.

Planning staff also based their recommendation on an opinion by planning board chairwoman Francoise Carrier that “parks should not be made available for non-park purposes except in extraordinary circumstances.”

While planning commissioners dismissed a private site as too expensive and the former Montgomery Hills Junior High School as a “non-starter” Monday, they pushed for MCPS to further consider the former elementary school and park at Lynnbrook, a site that could share a school and some parkland. At six acres, the park there is smaller than the 13-acre Rock Creek Hills Park and includes one athletic field, rather than two, according to the staff report.

A school there would be “less damaging” to the park system than a school at Rock Creek Hills, Carrier argued. “Lynnbrook is not used as heavily as a local park, and that’s a big deal to me. It’s not as big a loss to the community as Rock Creek Hills would be to its community,” Carrier said.

MCPS officials, however, said the site selection committee considered Lynnbrook and didn’t choose it because of its small size – 8.5 acres with the school and park – and because cramped Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School uses the fields there. “None of these sites were eliminated for any one reason,” Bruce Crispell, MCPS director of long range planning, said at the hearing.

The assertion was met with dismay by Carrier, who said the school system was focusing on the Rock Creek Hills site because as a former junior high school, it has the legal right to reclaim the property.

“I find it disheartening to hear the same arguments that suggest the school system is not open to the kind of suggestions we are trying to make,” Carrier said. “Rather than go straight to the site where you have the reclaim right, considering the view of the agency that owns and operates parks. Consider the value of these parks and just consider seriously that maybe it would be just as easy as work out just as well for your program, but work out better for our program for you to go to Lynnbrook, for instance, rather than Rock Creek Hills, rather than taking the path to force your way through because you’ve got the legal right to take it.”

The board voted to recommend the school system enter into discussions with planning staff about the feasibility of using the Lynnbrook site. Planning Board member Norman Dreyfuss dissented, however, saying the Rock Creek Hills site was an “appropriate” recommendation.

The board also voted to include in its recommendation comments on the school system’s site selection process, which planning staff said was rushed and didn’t allow enough time for each site to be fully considered. “How can you get through 38 sites in four meetings?” Carrier said.

Details on private sites considered were also kept confidential to protect potential negotiations with landowners, which Carrier said "hampered" the board's discussion.

The board’s recommendation, which is not binding, is set to be forwarded to the Board of Education.