Committee Considers New Concepts for Proposed B-CC Middle School

A committee charged with studying the site feasibility of a proposed new middle school in the Bethesda-Chevy Chase cluster voted down four design concepts for the site Wednesday night, leaving three options.

The vote came during the third meeting of the facility advisory committee at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, as between 40 and 50 people continued to debate the merits of the site and design concepts from the architect.

None of the designs are finalized, said architect Paul Falkenbury of Samaha Associates, PC. Later designs may incorporate some elements of rejected concepts or combine several elements from the remaining designs. Falkenbury presented four new concepts Wednesday night.

The committee voted to consider only concepts 4, 5 and 6 for the proposed site. Points of contention continued to involve the number and location of parking spaces, playing fields and courts, the building’s carbon footprint, bus and car drop-offs, and neighborhood traffic.

All of the proposed sites include space for 18 buses, which residents said was most likely inadequate for a school slated to house 944 students with a core of 1,200 students. Core areas include common areas such as the cafeteria.

Dennis Cross, senior facilities designer for Montgomery County Public Schools, said the design stage is a "fluid process" with shifting needs and requirements for the site. Those shifts are sometimes made at the request or suggestion of residents. Each concept has cons that must be considered in a final design decision, he said.

None of the concepts put forth so far meet all of the educational specification preferences for middle schools in the county, Cross said. But he stressed that those are preferences, not requirements.

"Right now, if this were the end of the feasibility study, every (concept) would have a con,” Cross said.

The site-selection committee for the school had recommended it be built at in Silver Spring. But the school board voted to in favor of building at Kensington's , the second approved site.

The feasibility study by the facility advisory committee is one step toward securing capital funding for the project, which, if approved, would take up to four years to build. There are three more meetings scheduled, but if the committee needs to add more, it will do so, Cross said. Cross said the committee meetings are moving the process forward and that he hopes they will finish their work by their September deadline.

“I think the process is going well so far, in the context of a community that doesn’t want it,” Cross said. “It may be that the site gets pulled, but we’re glad the community is seeing the need to participate.”

Cathy Fink said she is doing everything in her power to stop the school from being built on the site and that she still believes the site selection process was flawed.

"I'm still assuming that it's not going to be built," Fink said. "But I live in the community, so I show up at these meetings."

At the , Jim Pekar, who posts on a blog to save the park, asked Cross for the roster and minutes of the meeting where Samaha was selected as the architect for the proposed middle school and for a statement regarding what Pekar called the firm’s potential conflict of interest.

Pekar said in an e-mail that Cross received his request for the minutes and that MCPS will treat that request as they would a request under the Maryland Public Information Act, which means they have 30 days to comply. Pekar wrote that he had not heard back about a statement regarding conflict of interest.

The plan to build at Rock Creek Hills Local Park is meant to ease overcrowding at and to ensure that every sixth-grader in Chevy Chase attends a middle school instead of an elementary school. MCPS representatives have said the new middle school is needed to serve an area with increasing enrollment.