Options Presented For B-CC Elementary Boundary Study

Families living in the area referred to by school officials as the Bethesda-Chevy Chase cluster—East Bethesda, Chevy Chase and the western fringe of Silver Spring—have long been troubled by an unwieldy combination of long bus rides and fractured neighborhoods that result from

Monday evening, residents got their first look at five options for redrawing old school boundaries for and schools, which have long been the cause of frustration for families in the East Bethesda and Silver Spring neighborhoods.

Bruce Crispell, Director of the Division of Long Range Planning for Montgomery County Public Schools, presented the five options to a group of about 85 parents and neighborhood residents during the two-hour meeting at Rosemary Hills Primary School.

Crispell said he developed the five options after a series of discussions that began this spring with a committee comprised of parents and PTA representatives from the four elementary schools. To help clarify the different options, Crispell provided a map of the entire B-CC cluster area identifying each neighborhood by zone number.

Under the existing boundaries, there is a pattern of “partial pairing” or “split articulation,” whereby children from East Bethesda (Zones B-5 and B-6) travel by bus twice a day for as long as 40 minutes each way to attend kindergarten at Rosemary Hills, which serves children in grades Kindergarten through two. Their classmates in the Paddington Square neighborhood (Zones BRH-8) walk to their neighborhood school, Rosemary Hills.

By third grade however, Paddington Square children are bused from Silver Spring to Bethesda Elementary after their time at Rosemary Hills is done. When the East Bethesda children enter third grade and leave Rosemary Hills, they are funneled into a confusing labyrinth of school choices and appeal options that essentially scatters them among three different schools: Bethesda Elementary, Chevy Chase and North Chevy Chase.

Friendships that were forged in earlier years are disrupted by this pattern, East Bethesda parents have long worried. At the same time, multiple children from one family can conceivably be assigned to as many as three different public schools, depending on their ages, and children living next door to each other can stop socializing because they attend different schools, with different schedules and different bus routes, parents say.

Meanwhile, back in Silver Spring, children living in two of the four Summit Hills apartment buildings are bused to Chevy Chase Elementary School, while their neighbors in the other two buildings go to North Chevy Chase.

“More and more concern has been registered with the board,” Crispell said about the arrangement, which elicits a constant stream of complaints from parents, particularly in East Bethesda, about the lack of neighborhood unity and the distances their children must travel. “The Board wanted this simplified so we did not have this partial pairing.”

The five options attempt to address the problem of partial pairing, but they are not without their own complications.

For example, during the first round of discussions, the round table committee only had two options to consider, both of which appeared to satisfy their key criterion of keeping the East Bethesda neighborhood together. Options 1 and 2 re-assigned all or most of East Bethesda to Bethesda Elementary and put the Paddington Square children on a single track from Rosemary Hills to North Chevy Chase.

However, taking the East Bethesda children out of Rosemary Hills would shift the school's demographic balance by raising the percentage of children on free and reduced meals (FARMs) from 19% to 22% in Option 1 and to almost 21% in Option 2. At Bethesda Elementary, the percentage of FARMs children would drop to from 6.6% to 3.3.% in Option 1 and 3.7% in Option 2.

At the same time, the percentage of white children at Bethesda Elementary would rise from current 60.7 to 66.1% in Option 1, while dropping from 60.3% to 56.9% at Rosemary Hills.

At the request of the committee to look at better balancing demographics at the schools, Crispell recommended three additional options. The Board members will have final say over the boundaries when they vote on the options in November.

Options 3, 4 and 5 are designed to lower the FARMs rate at Rosemary Hills and to level out the racial composition among all four schools by assigning more of the Silver Spring portion of the cluster to Bethesda Elementary and Chevy Chase.

Option 4 would assign all of the Summit Hills apartments plus the Barrington Apartments to Bethesda Elementary. Option 5 would assign those same buildings to the Rosemary/Chevy Chase pairing. Option 3 would send all of the Summit Hills children to Bethesda Elementary, while assigning those in the Barrington Apartments to the Rosemary Hills/Chevy Chase pairing.

Options 3 and 4 would keep East Bethesda together in a Rosemary Hills/North Chevy Chase pairing. Option 5 would keep East Bethesda together at Bethesda Elementary from kindergarten through fifth grade.

Under Option 3, children from Paddington Square would be bused to Bethesda Elementary from kindergarten through the fifth grade. A detailed report of all five options is available at the Montgomery County Public Schools website.

Crispell said there is a Paddington Square representative on the round table committee. Crispell has spoken about the options at a community meeting in that neighborhood, as well as delivered enough leaflets for every apartment in the Paddington Square, Summit Hills and Barrington apartment buildings.

Thursday, Crispell and the boundary study committee will deliver their final report to the superintendent and Board of Education. In the fall, the new superintendent will make recommendations to the board. The board will vote on the options in November.

Participants at last night’s meeting were encouraged to fill out a community feedback form stating which options they prefer, and why. Those forms will be included in full in the report to the board. 

Anyone seeking further input into the options is encouraged to lobby school board officials and their council representatives before the November vote.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly attributed a statement regarding the first two boundary options to Bruce Crispell. This story has been updated to reflect that an additional three boundary options were developed at the request of the boundary committee, and that all five boundary options are currently under consideration. We regret the error.