When Vanessa Hiemenz walked her children into Silver Spring International Middle School for a back-to-school night last fall, she was stunned by the building’s outdated conditions.
The third floor had no working central air conditioning, so there were loud portable units in the middle of the rooms, said Hiemenz, who has a sixth- and eighth-grader at the middle school. Some stairways were so narrow only one-way traffic could navigate them at a time. And the classrooms were so far apart she could not reach each one in the allotted time students are given during passing periods.
“It was falling apart,” Hiemenz, 47, said. “I think a lot of parents felt like I did and we just started talking, ‘Like what is going on here?’”
As Montgomery County’s school board and county council decide which school projects to fund over the next six years, they are hearing from parents like Hiemenz about aging buildings and overcrowding. But construction costs and inflation have gone up, causing officials in Maryland’s most populous county to consider delaying some projects.
“The supply chain is one that’s impacted us greatly,” Montgomery Superintendent Monifa B. McKnight told county council members. The school system has not been able to get the materials as quickly as they are needed and prices have changed, she said. “We’ve had to increase the funding for a project — in some cases … almost double when you have to take into consideration the cost and inflation that’s over that time.”
The school system increased its six-year construction budget request more than 9 percent to $1.94 billion during negotiations this year due to “inflationary pressures and market conditions,” said Karla Silvestre, the school board president.
Click here to read the rest of the story written by Nicole Asbury over at The Washington Post
