To vote or not to vote?
That was one of the prevailing questions at an acrimonious meeting at Seven Locks Elementary School Jan. 6 to discuss plans for replacing Seven Locks by building a new, larger school on Kendale Road.
The sixth meeting of the Facilities Advisory Committee was expected to be the last, and should have culminated in a vote, community members present at the meeting said. Instead, it ended with plans for yet another meeting Jan. 27 to address a flood of comments from neighborhood residents and others who said they had been left out of the planning process.
While some of the frustrated residents may have wanted to comment on the actual school designs, which were posted on partitions at the front of the Seven Locks multi-purpose room, most voiced outright opposition to building the new school at all.
“We’re trying to put a square peg in a round hole. No matter what you do here, it’s still a square peg in a round hole. I think it’s the community’s right to have an advisory committee that says, ‘No, you cannot fit a square peg in a round hole,’” said David Tiktinsky. Tiktinsky, a Seven Locks parent, opposed any plan that might include closing Seven Locks Elementary and turning the land over to the county for other uses. “I know your job is to get a school done but your job is also to inform the higher ups that ‘hey look this community will not support what we’re doing here.’ … The reason why we don’t want to just say ‘Oh yeah it’s a great school’ [is] because that looks like the community supports that. The community, most of the community does not support what is going on here.”
Building the new school will result in redistricting for most of Potomac’s elementary schools, including Potomac Elementary.
No vote was taken Thursday and it was unclear whether there would be a vote at the Jan. 27 meeting. Moreover, it remains unclear what the significance of a vote would be, if one were to take place — or even what the question would be.
The Facilities Advisory Committee was charged with evaluating and providing input on architectural design plans for a new school on Kendale Road, officially called the Seven Locks Replacement School. The Board of Education has already funded the new school under the Capital Improvements Program and the school is due to open in September, 2007. Everyone seems to agree on that much.
What is not clear is who is a member of the committee or what actual power it has, if any, to dictate what happens on Kendale Road. The term “committee” may be something of a misnomer, implying fixed membership, when in fact the meetings have been open forums for anyone to attend and provide input on the plans.
The minutes of previous meetings reflect with asterisks the people who checked a box at sign-in saying they wished to be on the committee. Potomac Elementary PTA President Julie Dobson said that the option was available for at least three of the meetings. "I dont think they were turning anybody away," she said.
PRESIDING OVER the meeting, Jim Tokar, the Montgomery County Public Schools Project Manager in charge of the Kendale Road school, and Seven Locks Elementary Principal Robin Gordon emphasized that the role of the committee is limited to commenting on the designs. But community members argued that their overwhelming opposition to any plans to build is in fact a comment on the design and one that deserves to be heard.
Tokar and others noted that five previous meetings had taken place over the last four months and a large number of the 80 or more people in attendance Thursday had not been at the previous meetings. By show of hands, well fewer than half of people present indicated that they had attended three or more previous meetings.
“Members of the committee can vote and provide input on the final design. People that just showed up at the last night at the last minute, I’m sorry the opportunity was presented and that’s where we’re at,” Tokar said.
Nearby residents say that they were not given adequate notification of the pending plans for a new school or the meetings. A comment early in the meeting that the neighbors were notified of the meetings was met with loud murmurs of disagreement.
“We notified the immediate neighborhood, because they are the most affected by the placement of the new school. We notified the PTA and we rely on the PTA to notify the parents. We notified civic associations in the neighborhood also so they can notify or at least identify to their people that this is going on. And that’s the limit of what we do. We sent out probably about 100 letters. We don’t have the resources to send them out to everybody in the community. We just don’t,” Tokar said.
Gordon suggested that there would be other forums in which to deal with the pros and cons of building a new school at all, but attendees said they doubted that. Diana Conway, a Potomac Elementary parent member suggested that such concerns would be best directed to elected officials: the County Council, the School Board, and the County Executive.
Tokar said that voting had been discussed at the committee’s previous meeting Dec. 16 but said that there was no reason to take a vote.
“We don’t have to take a vote. There’s no need to take a vote, because I don’t think a vote is going to do any good. We’re looking for general acceptance,” he said. When questioned directly about plans for the Jan. 27 meeting, he replied, “We’re not going to vote next week on anything. Essentially, we’re taking this design one step further and we’re looking for general acceptance and input. If anybody has any comments at that time, give us your response, we’ll respond to them. We’ll take the time to respond to every comment that’s delivered. But we intend to move on with the process.”
Architect Michael Poness, of the design firm Walton, Madden, Cooper, Robinson, Poness, was given the chance to present his plans and the meeting settled into roughly an hour of questions and answers about the plans for the Kendale site, with questions focusing on the amount of parking and field space that the proposed school would provide compared to Seven Locks.
Not all of the comments were in opposition to the building plans. “Irrespective of what happens on this site—the Seven Locks site—this cluster needs a new elementary school,” said Dobson. “We are so overcrowded in this cluster. We have a lot of portables in this cluster. And this site has been owned by the county for a long time as an elementary school property. It’s the only site this cluster owns to build an elementary school on. So I think you’ve done a great job. I wish my kids could get in there next year. I’d like to have this school as soon as possible.”
The new school is seen as an outlet valve for overcrowding at Potomac Elementary, sometimes causing tension between Potomac parents and Seven Locks parents, who are glad to have their children attending one of the smallest elementary
schools in the county.
Arguments that renovating Potomac and Seven Locks would be cheaper than building the Kendale school don't hold up Dobson said. "They just dont buy that the county can't afford a 280 kid school. It's the same overhead whether its 558 or 280."
"The idea of splitting the money between the schools, it sounds great. But the problem with that solution is that $7 million won't take care of Potomac Elementary. It needs to be bulldozed and rebuilt and the county knows that."
Early in the meeting, a man yelled out, “Nobody wants this school” but several attendees stood up and said, “I want this school.”
ALMOST ALL OF the acrimony at the meeting hinged on the implied connection between the construction of the Kendale school and the possible eventual destruction of Seven Locks Elementary to make way for affordable housing. Although the Board of Education has not indicated any official plans for the future of Seven Locks, County Executive Doug Duncan has asked the board to turn over unneeded school sites for possible use for affordable housing.
Mike Waller, conveying a feeling of distress that many at the meeting seemed to share, said, “I moved here in 2000 and we bought a house right on Seven Locks within walking distance of here. And we studied the master plan before we bought so we would know what we were buying. I have seven kids, so we’ll be using this school until 2013, hopefully. We bought the house based on the master plan. It told us there was no change for this school.”