Superintendent Thomas W. Taylor presented his final boundary recommendations to the MCPS Board of Education (BOE) on Feb. 5. This marks the beginning of the end of MCPS’s ongoing boundary study which began in December 2024 and is set to wrap up in March 2026.
After receiving feedback from the community, Taylor found that the two most important issues to families were geography and stability of school assignment over time.
“To formulate my recommendation, I carefully reviewed and considered the eleven options and the stakeholder input received for these options in the context of the four policy factors,” Taylor wrote in his recommendation. “Following a review of all of the information and the updated student enrollment projections, I recommend a variation of Option B [for the reopening of Woodward and Northwood expansion], as I believe it advances the policy factors for most of the schools involved in the boundary study.”
Woodward Reopening and Northwood Expansion
Regarding WJ families, students attending Kensington Parkwood Elementary School and Garrett Park Elementary school will be subjected to split articulation, meaning that Kensington Parkwood students will attend either North Bethesda Middle School or Tilden Middle School, and by high school, those same students will be split between WJ and Woodward. Garrett Park students will all attend Tilden, but will be split between WJ and Woodward based on where they live. On the bright side for members within the region, only 8 out of 47 elementary schools will be subjected to split articulation.
Salo Zelermyer is a parent to four kids growing up in the MCPS community, worried about how the superintendent’s recommended boundaries will affect his younger children.
“Our main concern remains the stability of school assignments as so many families spent years planning around the school system,” Zelermyer said. “Our kids have very close friends in some neighborhoods that would be impacted and I would really hate for them to be separated. Our Kensington area is a very special community and my hope is that MCPS will keep our kids together.”
Ashburton Elementary and Wyngate Elementary School students will all attend North Bethesda and WJ. Students from Farmland, Luxmanor, Viers Mill and Wheaton Woods Elementary Schools will also form the community for the reopening of Woodward High School.
WJ is currently operating at a 138.6% facility utilization with 3,096 students, exceeding the student enrollment capacity by almost 900 students. With these new adjustments, by 2031, enrollment will be down to only 1,750 students.
Additionally, the number of students at WJ participating in the Food and Reduced-price Meals (FARMS) and the Emergent Multilingual Learners (EML) program will decrease. In fact, all but three high schools in the region will see either no change or a decrease in enrollment in these programs.
Looking at the grand scheme of things, this option will hit on all four main goals of the boundary study for most schools across the region: increasing diversity, maintaining close proximity from homes to schools, the stability of their school assignments and facility utilization.
Opening of Crown High School
Shockwaves were sent through the community when Taylor recommended that Wootton High School relocate to the newly built Crown High School building permanently, instead of opening Crown as its own school in 2027. The goal of this decision is to spend the year renovating the current Wootton facility with better accommodations for staff and students.
“It minimizes the costs and additional resources needed to operate an additional high school in the county given updated student enrollment data trends and limited resources,” Taylor stated. “The current site on Wootton Parkway will be used as a holding site for schools to allow for major construction projects as well as smaller projects such as roof replacements or Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) projects that usually occur over multiple phases, potentially accelerating secondary capital projects.”
Prior to Taylor’s presentation, community members testified against the move saying that they would love to see the original building updated, but they don’t think that moving the building completely is the best solution.
“This decision is bigger than any one community or any one city, and it is bigger than any one option,” Rockville City Councilmember Adam Van Grack said to the MCPS BOE. “This is a broad, cross-cluster, deeply informed resistance.”
What’s to come
If approved by the MCPS BOE, these new boundaries will begin to be implemented in the 2027-2028 school year when current 9th and 10th graders will move to their new high schools. By the 2029-2030 school year, all grades will be fully integrated into their new schools.
Throughout March 2026, MCPS will hold work sessions and public meetings to try to finalize Taylor’s recommendations and begin the process of their implementation into the community. Public hearings will be held on Feb. 23, Feb. 24, March 9 and March 10 and work sessions will be on March 3 and March 12.
