🗺️ New Recommended Boundary Lines

Yesterday, MCPS Superintendent Thomas Taylor released his recommended boundary plan to the Board of Education: a "variation of Option H". For Rockville, the centerpiece is hard to miss:

Wootton High School would physically relocate from its current Wootton Parkway campus to the new Crown Farm building for the 2027–28 school year. The current Wootton campus would then become a “Rockville Holding School”, a temporary home base for schools displaced by major construction, HVAC, or roof projects.

That's certainly a big one, but the Loop pulled out all the changes for Rockville-area schools and summarized them below:

• Most Wootton feeders stay Wootton, just at the new Crown Farm site: DuFief, Fallsmead, Lakewood, Stone Mill, and Travilah continue feeding Wootton.
• Cold Spring ES is the one that leaves, it would shift to the Churchill pathway.
• Wootton gains two new feeders:
  • Fields Road ES would move from Quince Orchard HS to Wootton (via Robert Frost MS).
  • Rosemont ES “island assignment #8” (portion west of I-270) would move from Gaithersburg HS to Wootton (via Robert Frost MS).
• Demographics shift mainly because of those additions: FARMS rises from 14% → 19%, and EML rises from 3.1% → 6.0%. Asian student share drops from 44.2% → 39.0%, while Hispanic representation increases from 9.0% → 14.9%.
• Middle school feeders reshuffle into three lanes:
  • Robert Frost MS gains Fields Road ES and the Rosemont island (with Frost’s FARMS rising 15.2% → 25.2% and EML 4.5% → 8.1%).
  • Cabin John MS gains Travilah ES.
  • Herbert Hoover MS gains Stone Mill ES.

One of the selling points: walkability. The number of students in the non-transported area would increase from 551 at the current Wootton Parkway site to 718 at Crown Farm. And the new Wootton site is projected to land around 95% utilization by 2031–32, or right in the “sweet spot.”

Richard Montgomery cluster: This is the simple one. No boundary changes are recommended for the schools feeding RM: Bayard Rustin, Beall, College Gardens, Ritchie Park, and Twinbrook all continue through Julius West MS → Richard Montgomery HS.

That said, RM does get indirect breathing room in the projections: its facility utilization drops from 107.5% (current boundaries) to 89.3% by 2031–32, moving from overcrowded into the efficient range with no feeder swaps driving demographic change.