Dear Superintendent McKnight and Members of the MCPS Board of Education,

Thank you for your leadership during these challenging times.  You continue to bravely make difficult decisions to keep our children safe and to keep their education viable and we appreciate your efforts.

We, the parents and friends of Clarksburg Elementary School, are deeply concerned about the rapidly deteriorating learning environment at our school.  Our school is built to serve 311 students, and yet our enrollment is approaching 800.  This is over 250% utilization of our space.  In most areas of the county, a building moratorium is enacted if a school reaches 120%, but we passed that mark years ago and our population keeps increasing.

We have 12 portables lining our field, and art and music will be taught from carts, since those teachers’ rooms have been converted to grade-level classes.  So have the windowless communications and computer labs.   Our reading initiatives specialists lost their instructional space as well, so students who need individualized attention will be forced to remain in the general classroom, full of distractions and noise.  The school’s three bathrooms have the capacity to serve 311 students – not 800 – and over 300 students must badge into the school to get to them.

Therefore, we demand the following:

1. As soon as they become available, install three additional portable classrooms at Clarksburg Elementary to allow our music and art classes to be taught properly.
2. Provide a portable bathroom for the 12 classes being taught outside the school building.
3. Update enrollment projections for the 2022-2023 school year to accurately reflect the student population that is already attending our school.
4. Ensure that Clarksburg Elementary #9 in the Cabin Branch community breaks ground this winter, to stay on schedule to open in the fall of 2023. 

There are no less than six housing developments either in progress or approved to begin construction within Clarksburg Elementary School’s boundaries, so this extreme overcrowding is going to increase during the 2021-22 school year and into the following year.  MCPS has turned a blind eye to this situation for far too long, and we need action now.

Contact us to learn more.  Please visit our school and see the rows of portables and the long lines of gridlocked traffic that extend past our school’s narrow road each morning and evening.  Have lunch with a kindergarten student at 10 am, less than an hour after she arrives at school.  Stand in line with a fifth-grade student who has to wait 30 minutes to use a bathroom.  Talk to our music and art teachers who have no space of their own and cannot effectively provide instruction on their CORE subjects, so vital to the well-rounded development of our children.  

We need your help to make our school better for our children.  They deserve basic instructional space now – not in two years.  Thank you for your attention to this urgent matter.

Sincerely,

The Clarksburg ES PTA and Parents