Fixing broken stuff in government is so satisfying, especially when it addresses school overcrowding and our housing crisis. We’re on the verge of a big fix, and I want to share the story.
I’ll start with what’s broken.
Piney Orchard Elementary School is projected to be at 162% of its state-rated student capacity this fall. Seventeen county schools are projected to be above 100% capacity in the coming school year.
Other schools are far below capacity. In fact the number of “vacant seats,” or seats below capacity not being utilized, grew from 9,194 in 2010 to 16,297 in 2022.
When a high school is projected to be above 100% capacity, housing permits in the feeder area at subdivisions of five or more units are blocked for six years, effectively preventing them from moving forward. The same is true for elementary and middle school feeder zones when the capacity is projected to reach 95%.
The parts of our county that are “closed” to development by the school capacity chart are the areas where our smarter, greener, more equitable Plan2040 targets growth: redevelopment sites, town centers, and transit hubs. If we shifted development to the areas where we have school capacity today, we’d be returning to the sprawl development and forest removal patterns of the past.
Our workforce, our small businesses, our seniors, and our young people are warning us that our housing shortage has become a crisis, a crisis that is our primary portal to poverty. That’s why our budget created a permanent funding source from high-dollar real estate transfers for a new Affordable Housing Trust Fund. It’s also why we have a work group tasked with drafting legislation to require a percentage of new units in subdivisions to be affordable for essential workers.
But if we don’t fix our school capacity imbalance, we can’t address our housing crisis.
The solution to overcrowding, to utilizing existing capacity, and to removing a major impediment to addressing our housing crisis has two parts.
First is school redistricting, and I commend the current Board of Education for facing up to that fact when previous boards would not. They have put two scenarios for the northern half of the county out for comment, and the Superintendent’s recommendation will go to the Board for consideration next month. Those new districts will take effect in fall of 2024 and put every school in the northern half of the county at or below 100% capacity. The southern half of the county will be redistricted two years later.
Part two is updating our legislation to prevent this problem from recurring, so we created a School APF Workgroup to study how we got ourselves into this situation and what our policy should be in the future. One option was to hold off on closing neighborhoods to development until school utilization is projected to be in the 105%-115% range, as is done in Baltimore, Montgomery, Prince Georges, Howard, Harford, St. Mary’s, Carroll, and Charles counties. Accepting overcrowding, we decided, is the wrong approach. We can do better than that for our students.
Instead, we are proposing a system whereby the feeder area will be closed if a school is projected to surpass 100% capacity and there is no available capacity in an adjacent area. This gives the Board of Education advance notice of the need to adjust a boundary, hopefully creating a future in which boundaries move incrementally to accommodate student population before overcrowding happens.
The bill before the County Council next week firmly establishes the 100% threshold, requires that the Board of Education share its methodology for projecting school capacity, implements the adjacency policy, and also adds housing that meets an affordability threshold to an existing list of exemptions.
I chose to burden you with the details of this problem and solution because it’s in the category of “hard stuff” for local government to do, and it’s really important to our future. With a less engaged community, or a more divided County Council, the collaboration that has brought us to this point would not have happened. Instead, we are going into next week’s Council meeting with the support of two groups that rarely agree on land use: home builders and the Growth Action Network.
By passing this bill, our County Council will have taken an important step forward. But more work remains. From there, we will carefully manage county growth in compliance with Plan2040, and we will work with our Board of Education to implement their Facilities Master Plan, thereby producing for our kids a future that is smarter, greener, more equitable, and better educated.
Until next week…
Steuart Pittman
Anne Arundel County Executive