The Bethesda Downtown Plan area is geographically within the Bethesda-Chevy Chase school cluster service area, which is served by Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School and its feeder schools, primarily Westland Middle School and Bethesda, Somerset, and Westbrook Elementary Schools. A small commercial area in the southeastern portion of the Plan Area on the southeast quadrant is served by Silver Creek Middle School and the paired Rosemary Hills (K-2) and Chevy Chase (3-5) Elementary Schools.
As a process of monitoring the adequacy of school facilities in relation to the Bethesda Downtown Sector Plan, this report reviews the latest enrollment and capacity data of the Bethesda-Chevy Chase (B-CC) Cluster collectively at each school level. For the 2025 Monitoring Report, the actual enrollment and capacity reported for the 2024-2025 school year and projections for six years later (2030-2031) are analyzed. The projections for the cluster’s middle schools and high school, however, are subject to change following the results of the Charles W. Woodward High School boundary study.
2024 Cluster Adequacy Review
The cluster saw another year of decline in its total K-12 enrollment. At the elementary school and high school levels, enrollment increased nominally by 15 students, or 0.5%, and 9 students, or 0.4%, respectively. The middle school enrolment, however, decreased by 41 students, a 2.5% decrease. As a result, the cluster – wide utilization rate remains 81.1% at the elementary school level, has decreased to 80.3% at the middle school level, and has increased slightly to 96.0% at the high school level.
MCPS is no longer projecting an increase in enrollment at the elementary school level. In the 2030-2031 school year, the cluster-wide utilization rate is expected to drop to 80.8%, which is barely within the 80 to 100 percent utilization rate range that MCPS considers efficient for an individual school to be operating at. At the secondary school level, the FY 2026 projections indicate that middle school enrollment will rebound by the 2030-2031 school year and high school enrollment will see a slight increase. However, these projections do not reflect any potential change in enrollment that would occur when the Woodward High School boundary study results are approved, and students are reassigned accordingly in 2027.
Shifting Trend: Enrollment Decline Leads to Abundance of Surplus Capacity
The Bethesda-Chevy Chase Cluster received significant capital investment throughout the past fifteen years to address a strong wave of enrollment growth it had been experiencing since 2008. The cluster’s total capacity increased by more than 1,400 seats at the elementary school level, more than 1,000 seats at the middle school level, and more than 750 seats at the high school level. The cluster’s enrollment however has peaked since, in 2016 at the elementary school level and in 2019 at the middle school level. The cluster now has a considerable amount of surplus capacity available. Projections for the 2030-2031 school year indicate that there will be more than 775 surplus seats available at the elementary school level cluster-wide, which is more than the number of students enrolled at any of the feeder schools. There are also more than 375 surplus seats projected at the middle school level.
The following table shows the capacity, enrollment, and surplus capacity available at each individual school and the cluster-wide total for the 2024-2025 school year and the 2030-2031 school year projections.
Surplus Capacity of Bethesda-Chevy Chase Cluster and Feeder Schools
| School/Cluster | 2024-2025 Capacity | 2024-2025 Enrollment | 2024-2025 Surplus Seats | 2030-2031 Capacity | 2030-2031 Enrollment | 2030-2031 Surplus Seats |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School | 2475 | 2377 | 98 | 2475 | 2463 | 12 |
| Cluster Total – Middle School | 1979 | 1590 | 389 | 1979 | 1602 | 377 |
| Silver Creek MS | 915 | 751 | 164 | 915 | 762 | 153 |
| Westland MS | 1064 | 839 | 225 | 1064 | 840 | 224 |
| Cluster Total – Elementary School | 4053 | 3287 | 766 | 4053 | 3275 | 778 |
| Bethesda ES | 560 | 645 | -85 | 560 | 631 | -71 |
| Chevy Chase ES | 483 | 434 | 49 | 483 | 471 | 12 |
| North Chevy Chase ES | 391 | 237 | 154 | 391 | 250 | 141 |
| Rock Creek Forest ES | 771 | 690 | 81 | 771 | 681 | 90 |
| Rosemary Hills ES | 650 | 499 | 151 | 650 | 487 | 163 |
| Somerset ES | 550 | 314 | 236 | 550 | 340 | 210 |
| Westbrook ES | 648 | 468 | 180 | 648 | 415 | 233 |
During the Bethesda Downtown Plan development stage, a build-out enrollment estimate of the Bethesda-Chevy Chase cluster was calculated under a hypothetical scenario in which the residential capacities allowed in all recently adopted plan areas would be built out to their maximums. This estimate included impacts of the Bethesda Downtown Plan, the Greater Lyttonsville Plan, Chevy Chase Lake, Friendship Heights Master Plan, and Westbard Sector Plans, and assumed that the enrollment from existing residential areas will remain stable throughout the life of the Plan. However, the cluster’s declining enrollment has invalidated that assumption, undermining the approach of using max build-out enrollment estimates to gauge the long-term adequacy of school capacity. For example, when the build-out enrollment estimate was calculated in 2018, the cluster’s total elementary school enrollment was projected to be 3,690 students for the 2023-2024 school year. The actual enrollment that was reported in the 2023-2024 school year however was only 3,272 students, 418 students less than what was projected. This is in spite of development and approvals in the Bethesda Overlay Zone reaching the 30.4 million square feet threshold in September 2023.
Scheduled Capital Projects and Solutions Impacting the Cluster
On March 28, 2023, the Board of Education decided on the scope of a boundary study to establish the service area for the reopening of Charles W. Woodward High School. The scope includes the high school and middle schools serving the Bethesda-Chevy Chase cluster, in addition to those serving the Downcounty Consortium, Walter Johnson, and Walt Whitman clusters. The scope, however, does not include any of the elementary schools.
Once Woodward High School reopens with its new facility on 11211 Old Georgetown Road, which is currently scheduled for the 2027-2028 school year, a student reassignment process will start taking effect. This will likely alter the enrollment and utilization projections of the Bethesda-Chevy Chase cluster high school and middle schools. The current enrollment projections, however, do not reflect any of this potential change – the boundary study options have not been developed and the extent of each option’s impact on the cluster is yet unknown. MCPS’s projections will typically start reflecting any change to boundaries once the decisions are made by the Board of Education.
Recommendations
The enrollment trends of the schools that serve the Bethesda Downtown Plan Area should continue to be monitored as recommended by the Sector Plan. However, given the increasing amount of surplus capacity becoming available within the cluster and across the County, if an individual school, e.g. Bethesda Elementary School, is projected to reach a level of overutilization that warrants relief, reassigning students to adjacent schools with surplus capacity available should be considered.