City's growth law inadequate
This is the second in a series on school redistricting in Frederick County by Gillian Grozier.
[Photo: Clover Ridge Development, by Gillian Grozier]
Board of Education members are grappling with how to balance student enrollment growth and new residential development. The May 10 BOE meeting focused on overcrowding at Waverley Elementary School in Frederick city, currently at 157% capacity. Parents attending the meeting said they want their children to stay in the neighborhood where they can walk to school.
However, a city growth ordinance designed to ensure adequate infrastructure, including schools, was passed after approval of a development that will feed into Waverley ES, and Frederick County Public Schools does not have a way to manage the absorption rate. The role of FCPS is to provide quarterly enrollment figures for each school in order to determine capacity plus enrollment projections. It also specifies the formulas with which to determine other pupil generation rates. The resulting tables are posted on the FCPS website.
In Frederick city, the development approval process is part of the city’s Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance (APFO), adopted on Apr. 15, 2007. Under the city code for development, the APFO spells out a linear process by which the city's Planning Commission can withhold approvals in circumstances where the developer does not meet specified criteria.
According to the APFO: “An elementary, middle or high school is considered adequate if the projected enrollment is less than, or equal to one hundred (100) percent of State Rated Capacity(SRC) …. For each residential project, each school (elementary, middle and high school) only needs to pass the test … once for the residential development project to be eligible to proceed.”
In the case of Waverley ES, a 723-unit residential planned development adjacent to Waverley ES was approved prior to the adoption of the APFO, and is exempt from regulations. The original Master Plan for Waverley View was approved on May 16, 2001 but the first site plan was not approved until April 29, 2006. Even if Waverley View had been approved after the city passed the APFO, the developer could have obtained APFO approval by submitting a mitigation agreement after three years.
In short, a residential development project delayed because the schools do not meet the adequacy test, can go ahead anyway after a waiting period. As schools respond to sustained growth in the student population, the BOE is left with only three choices: mobile classrooms, redistricting, or an appeal to the city and state to finance new construction.
Today, Waverley View could not pass the APFO schools adequacy test. The Mar. 31, 2017 FCPS quarterly enrollment report gives state-rated capacity as 416 students. As enrollment is 685, Waverley ES is now at 157% capacity. Waverley ES has not been under 100% capacity since 2008. School population growth has been sustained, not cyclical, for the last few years. And, having been tested and approved once, the current regulations allow for the developer to proceed.
The last changes to the Waverley View Master Plan were made at the December 13, 2010 City Planning Commission meeting, and reported in the minutes. “Prior to the adoption of the APFO, the City controlled the influx of students into the school system through phasing plans which generally limited a developer from recording so many lots per year based on a maximum cap pupil generation yield.
For example, a project may only be able to introduce 50 students per year throughout the term of the phasing schedule. This was intended to provide the FCPS with a planning tool for future school construction projects, redistricting, etc.,” Division Manager of Current Planning Gabrielle Collard said.
Collard says Waverley View submitted a preliminary subdivision plat and was approved some time before 2006 for 410 multifamily units, 55 single family homes and 267 townhouses. Phase I of this five-phase project begins this fall with 139 units released onto the market out of a total of 723 units planned.
The APFO clarifies many of the steps in the regulations for new residential construction. For instance, it has the authority to limit an approval period. In Section 4-6(c)(1) a development of between 501 and 1,000 units, the size of the Waverley View development near Waverley ES, can obtain various preliminary or final subdivision plats valid until Apr. 15, 2017. The APFO has a built-in flexibility for developers. It can issue exemptions, make extensions, issue a moratorium, issue concurrent approvals, to name a few options. No such tools are offered to the school district when faced with a substantial influx of students from new developments.
In particular, the developer must obtain a Certificate of Adequate Public Facilities for Schools, known as a CAPF-SCH. However, as stated in Section 4-12, “if one or more of the schools being tested for the residential project fails, the test … shall be repeated. A residential project that fails the schools test for three (3) years is permitted to obtain a CAPF-SCH.”
Waverley View has a history of delays. Collard says the original plan to phase in units based on pupil generation had long since expired and tied instead to the completion of various infrastructure projects such as road construction. Waverley Drive, for example, had to be constructed as part of Phase I and completed prior to construction of the 139 units before permitting. In addition, this phasing schedule was not tied to a timeframe, only construction milestones.
There is much discussion in the minutes about how to phase in site improvements, but no discussion on how the phasing reallocation would impact the absorption rate of students into the school district. From the public comments section, the projected number of new students from Waverley View is 300.
The impression is that all parties were anxious to get the project off the ground, since it had been in the planning stages for well over a decade. As the focus remains firmly on trying to minimize further delays, little or no attention has been paid to a review of the development’s impact on the surrounding school attendance area, once built.
The city’s APFO also makes little provision for its Planning Commission to consult with the FCPS Board of Education about the impact. The regulations call for only one meeting per year between the Mayor and Board of Aldermen, County Commissioners and the BOE to discuss “priorities for construction projects relating to schools within the City.”
New home construction has changed since Frederick city’s APFO was approved in 2007. Based on 2010 census data, Frederick County has experienced a sustained growth rate of about one per cent a year. The government website reports 11 multi-family development projects currently either with preliminary plan approval or under construction, totaling 5,921 dwelling units spread over 1,095 acres.
Frederick city's development pipeline reports a total of 11,496 housing units under construction with at least preliminary planning approval. The pipeline identifies the attendance areas served as 314 housing units in the Hillcrest ES area, 265 in the Waverley ES area, and 185 in the Orchard Grove area.
One way to alleviate the overcrowding at Waverley ES is to transfer some students to Butterfly Ridge when it opens in September 2018, some board members said. But such a move does not reduce the concentration of poverty at Waverley, as board members pointed out. To further complicate the redistricting issue, the three public forums held in March and April had brought to light other requests for redistricting, one from downtown Frederick, for example, and another from the Linton Farm community.
Another way to meet the enrollment challenge now under discussion is to narrow the scope of the current redistricting plan to Orchard Grove, Hillcrest and Waverley ES only, and to begin a county-wide redistricting effort almost immediately.
