Kendale scandal reverberates to other schools

The Kendale school scandal goes beyond Potomac Elementary and Seven Locks. It affects the entire local closter of elementary schools.

"We’ve been trying to frame it in a cluster-wide context and nobody wants to talk about that," said Montgomery County Council of PTAs Area Vice President Rosanne Hurwitz in the Potomac Almanac. "It’s not just these two schools. Its really about getting all of these kids into buildings. . . . These kids are in third-world buildings."

According to reporter Ken Millstone, "Hurwitz and others said that the parent community’s original position regarding Seven Locks and Kendale was simply that MCPS should not consider giving up any existing school land.

"'This whole thing got started because they were going to give away another school site,' Hurwitz said, referring to a February 2004 memo from schools Superintendent Jerry Weast to the Board of Education stating, 'I am inclined to recommend that the Seven Locks site be transferred to the county for workforce housing' if the Kendale school is built.

"'We were always concerned about calling it Seven Locks "replacement." We wanted it to be called Churchill Number 6,' a temporary designation for a new, sixth elementary school in the area that feeds into Winston Churchill High School, Hurwitz said."

"The whole motivation has been that they want to build housing on one of these sites and they really have to take that off the table,” says Hurwitz. "It is not off the table. It is specifically not off the table."