Montgomery County Code now requires the Planning Department to update school impact taxes on a biennial basis in odd-numbered years. To calculate the taxes, it is necessary to have updated student generation rates based on the most current school enrollment figures. In the fall of each even-numbered year, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) provides the Planning Department with a dataset that includes the address and grade of every MCPS student (all other identifying information is scrubbed from the dataset).
The Planning Department then cross-references this information with parcel data that identifies the type of housing at the student’s address (single-family home, townhouse, multifamily housing, etc.). Using updated housing stock data, the Planning Department is then able to calculate rates for the number of elementary, middle and high school students generated by different types of housing across various areas of the county. When the rates were last calculated using fall 2016 enrollment data, staff was able to match 99.1 percent of the more than 159,000 MCPS students to a housing type and update the school impact taxes.