Mom to BoE: 'You are about schools and education, not housing'

"You are about schools and education, not housing," Diana Conway, mother three students at Potomac Elementary School, told the Montgomery Board of Education. "The county's failure to correct its affordable housing policy does not mean this board must now perpetuate the overcrowding of schools."

Mrs. Conway was responding to the board's sudden and unexplained decision to scrap a planned upgrading of Seven Locks Elementary School. Instead, for reasons that are still murky, the board reversed itself and agreed to County Executive Doug Duncan's request that school property in the area be surplused and handed over to the county for the construction of high-density housing.

Seven Locks PTA President Chris Rigaux - against the votes of PTA members - said he supported the county's plan to build a new school and moving the kids to it. He spoke for almost all PTA members when he said that "we do not believe the Seven Locks site should be surplused under any circumstances," according to the Potomac Gazette. "They will shortly realize they need another elementary school and will not have that option if they level Seven Locks and construct [housing]."