Montgomery County Planning Board Certifies FY2022 Annual School Test and Accepts School Utilization Report

Montgomery County Planning Board Certifies FY2022 Annual School Test and Accepts School Utilization Report

Annual School Test will guide school adequacy and Utilization Premium Payments for fiscal year

Per Montgomery Planning:

WHEATON, MD – The Montgomery County Planning Board certified the FY2022 Annual School Test results and accepted the accompanying School Utilization Report at their June 17 virtual meeting in accordance with the Growth and Infrastructure Policy (GIP). The GIP, formerly known as the Subdivision Staging Policy, imposes Utilization Premium Payments on developers building new housing units in school service areas projected to be overutilized. Utilization Premium Payments take the place of an automatic residential housing moratorium, which was eliminated as part of the update to the GIP in November 2020.

View the June 17 Planning Board staff report
View the FY2022 Annual School Test Results
View the FY2022 School Utilization Report

The Planning Board acted on the following items:

Certification of the FY2022 Annual School Test: Under the new GIP, the Annual School Test evaluates the projected utilization of each individual MCPS school facility four years in the future – the 2025-26 school year for the FY2022 Test. If a school is expected to exceed certain utilization level thresholds, its school service area is placed in a Utilization Premium Payment (UPP) tier. There are three different tiers – Tier 1 for moderate overutilization, Tier 2 for intermediate, and Tier 3 for the highest overutilization – with corresponding payment rates, which are paid by the developer in addition to any applicable school impact tax.

In addition to the automatic UPP Tier placement, the Annual School Test also determines the adequacy ceiling of each school service area to subsequent tiers. If a development application’s estimated number of students at a certain school level is found to exceed an adequacy ceiling, then the payment factor is upward adjusted in correlation to the number of students counted toward each payment tier.

Montgomery Planning staff prepared the FY2022 Annual School Test results, which were certified by the Planning Board to take effect on July 1, 2021.

Highlights of the FY2021 Annual School Test

• • Tier 1 UPP placement:
    • Four high school service areas (James H. Blake, Gaithersburg, Northwest, and Paint Branch)
    • Two middle school service areas (John T. Baker and Benjamin Banneker)
    • Six elementary school service areas (Arcola, Burning Tree, Diamond, Farmland, Judith A. Resnik, and Sargent Shriver)
  • Tier 2 UPP placement:
    • Three high school service areas (Clarksburg, Richard Montgomery, and Quince Orchard)
    • No middle school service areas
    • Four elementary school service areas (Ashburton, Bannockburn, Greencastle, and Watkins Mill)
  • Tier 3 UPP placement:
    • No high school or middle school service areas
    • Two elementary school service areas (Burtonsville and Mill Creek Towne)

FY2022 School Utilization Report: The new GIP requires Montgomery Planning to prepare a School Utilization Report to accompany the Annual School Test. The Report consists of countywide and individual school elements that provide supplemental information about the county’s public school facilities. A snapshot of 2020 housing data by school service area, including single family home sales, housing development, and total residential dwelling units, was added in the FY2022 School Utilization Report. As data from additional years are analyzed, future reports may include housing trends by school service area.