Board approves bigger and better Cresthaven ES

County plans to demolish existing facility and build new school on current site for nearly twice as many students

The Montgomery County Planning Board approved the mandatory referral, an approval all government entities and public utilities must receive from the Planning Board for any construction project, and a forest conservation plan for the school Thursday.

Construction should start in January and is projected to finish by July 1, 2010, according to Joe DeRosa, the project manager for Montgomery County Public School's division of construction.

Cresthaven, built in the 1960s, now serves 350 students in grades 3 through 5. But before its sister school, Roscoe Nix Elementary School in Silver Spring, was renovated in 2006, it had to use 17 portable trailers to accommodate all its students.

Roscoe Nix Elementary School, located two miles south of Cresthaven at 1100 Corliss Road, is Cresthaven's feeder school with kindergarten through second grade.

DeRosa said students will be relocated about two miles north to Fairland Center, a holding school and the old site of Fairland Elementary located at 13313 Old Columbia Pike.

Cresthaven's assistant principal, Yolanda Stanislaus, said the school is making every effort to accommodate families during the move, such as keeping bus routes the same year-round and moving the school's before- and after-school day care to Fairland Center.

"We know this is a big change for the community," she said.

The current 46,000-square-foot school sits on 9.8 acres. The proposed new school will be 77,000 square feet on approximately the same acreage. It will eventually have a capacity of 640 students and be three stories in some places.

However, the new building had several environmental obstacles to overcome.

Amy Lindsey, an environmental planner with the county, said the steep, highly erodible slopes around Cresthaven can't be built on.

"You can see the soil just sheeting off the sides of the hills," she said in Thursday's Planning Board meeting. But she said because the school will mostly stay on its original site, it will not disrupt the slopes. Of the nearly 4.5 acres of forest on the property, about 3.58 will be retained, according to a planning board memo.

Another concern is three large white oak trees at the entrance of the school. Lindsey said the school is going to try to save two of them but that it may not be possible.

Planning Board members agreed Thursday if the trees cannot be saved, the school would need to replace them with two equally large trees.

The school is also aiming for a silver Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating, the third-highest in a national environmental rating system, according to a Planning Board memo. Reuse of the existing site will save open space and reduce impact on the environment, regional construction materials will be used and the school plans to landscape with indigenous plants, which require less care. Between 80 and 120 geothermal pumps will be built under the school's ball park to cycle heat from below the earth's surface to power the school, DeRosa said.

The construction cost is estimated at $23,862,000, according to a memo on the project from the Montgomery County Public School division of construction. It is more cost effective to demolish the school than to renovate it, according to the memo. The funds were approved in the 2009 Capitol Improvement Program, a MCPS official said.

Eileen Finnegan, with the Hillandale Citizen's Association, said the community has been looking forward to a new elementary school while recognizing that the small property has been a challenge to the architects.

"Cresthaven has been a very sad story for many years," she said. "After years of appealing to the school system, we are finally getting a modernization."

However, Lindsey said the new school, which will be built long and narrow, fits well into the environmental guidelines because the environment was considered during planning.

The new school will have 23 classrooms equipped with wireless Internet capability and three entrance driveways which will allow parents to pick up and drop off their children separate from the buses.

Houses border the north and south of the property and West Hillandale Swim Club is to the west.