Declining enrollment and serious infrastructure issues led Montgomery County schools Superintendent Thomas Taylor to throw a curveball into the district’s high school boundary study plan.

Taylor wants to consider using the new Crown High building in Gaithersburg as a “holding school” to house students while their own campuses undergo massive renovations.

Even as he raised the idea, Taylor acknowledged it might not be the right choice.

“This makes a lot of sense,” Taylor told the school board Thursday. “It can make a lot of sense and still be a terrible idea.”

His announcement comes just days after he laid out the district’s severe campus facility issues, acknowledging that many schools have broken HVAC systems, leaking roofs and mold.

He wants a $2.7 billion investment in capital improvements over six years. Even that sum, he warned, wouldn’t be enough to deal with the facility needs in the district’s more than 200 schools.

To make quick and safe progress on much-needed high school improvement projects, Taylor said, it’s essential to have a space to house students while their home campuses get touched up.

“There’s a desperate need for us to have secondary holding facilities,” he said.

Taylor said using the new Crown building as such a facility would require in-depth conversations with community members and state officials, along with a board vote to change the scope of the district’s boundary study.

Montgomery County Public Schools launched this boundary study to prepare for opening Crown, expanding Damascus High School and reopening Charles W. Woodward High School for the 2027-28 year. They needed to redraw boundary lines to decide who attends which campus, with ripple effects expanding to other high schools and middle schools across the county. The plan has been to open Crown as a new high school in August 2027.

“This is a pretty significant adjustment,” Taylor said of his new Crown idea.

Several factors make it worthy of consideration, he told the board.

Declining enrollment — plus upcoming construction projects at Damascus, Magruder and Wootton High schools — creates an environment in which the district may want to use Crown High as a holding school before it gets established as its own permanent campus, Taylor said.

It would help the system avoid completing massive construction projects while students are on-site and trying to learn.

Brian Rabin, the Wootton High School PTSA president, lauded Taylor’s idea. He said opening a new campus doesn’t solve the facilities problems in existing schools.

“This is a great solution,” he said. “With enrollment dropping, this makes more sense. It solves the issue of needing a holding school.”

Equity concerns

Tensions around high school boundaries were swirling at Thursday’s meeting before Taylor’s announcement.

Several parents asked school district leaders to prove their commitment to equity through the way they redraw campus boundaries.

The latest Charles W. Woodward High School Boundary Study Options upset some families because they felt the maps prioritized stability for the county’s wealthiest campuses.

In the new drafts, high schools that serve families from wealthier neighborhoods, such as Bethesda-Chevy Chase and Whitman, would not absorb more impoverished students.

“If we say we value equity and diversity, we must back it up when it counts,” Westland Middle School parent Victoria Hougham said.

Boundary studies give district officials a chance to shift students to balance enrollment among campuses — and can be used to better integrate schools.

Many families were hopeful the new lines would build racial and economic diversity among the county’s public schools. But that’s not what they see.

“The recently revised boundary options appear to have been strategically designed to concentrate lower-income households and minority students in a small number of its schools in less wealthy neighborhoods,” county parent Darren Vieira told the school board.

This article may be updated.