Arcola Elementary School is bursting.
The campus was at 114% capacity last year, with 91 more little bodies than the brick building was meant to handle.
Even as enrollment declines overall in Montgomery County Public Schools, Arcola must use every bit of its square footage. That includes its four portable classrooms, set apart from the main campus.
For decades MCPS has erected hundreds of portables — also called trailers, relocatables and learning cottages — outside its schools. Now, as Maryland’s largest district prepares for elementary school redistricting, some parents are wondering if they’ll finally roll away.
Andrea Swiatocha, the district’s deputy chief of facilities management, said the upcoming boundary study “has the potential to reduce MCPS’s long-term reliance on portable classrooms.”
Still, Swiatocha said, some portables are likely to stick around. They’ll be needed to balance building capacity and account for enrollment bubbles.
“Our goal is to get and remove as many of those as possible as we redraw and balance things out,” Swiatocha recently told the school board.
At the same July meeting at which school board members outlined the elementary redistricting plan, they signed off on releasing more than 300 relocatable classrooms. It will cost about $3.7 million for students to occupy them next school year.
Roughly 60% of the district’s portables are on elementary campuses.
This reliance on trailers – a norm in many school districts across the country – frustrates many parents.
“There are a whole slew of reasons why parents hate these,” said Natalie LaLonde, who has two kids attending Arcola in the fall.
For starters, the relocatable classrooms at Arcola don’t have running water. Trips to the bathroom mean walking outside, then waiting to get buzzed into the main building.
Kids can’t wash their hands in a portable, LaLonde added. “From a public health perspective — in an elementary school setting — hand-washing is kind of an important thing, right?”
Then there are safety concerns, related to the threat of outsiders and the weather. Without a covered pathway, fifth graders face rain, sleet and snow when navigating between the portables and the main campus.
“This is one reason why I’m actually actively looking forward to some of this boundary study,” LaLonde said.
Boundary studies are always fraught; parents often buy their homes and plan their lives around where they expect their children to attend school. New attendance zones can upend those expectations. MCPS leaders will also be considering campus closures.
The number of students in kindergarten through fifth grade has gone down about 9% since 2019.
“As enrollment has declined, utilization across elementary schools increasingly has become imbalanced,” district documents state. “While certain areas of Montgomery County are experiencing localized growth, nearby schools often have significant available capacity.”
Officials don’t expect to implement changes until the 2029–30 school year. Ahead of that, the district will carry out a comprehensive study, solicit community feedback and hold public information sessions.
LaLonde acknowledged there will be “winners and losers” when MCPS debuts new attendance maps. She hopes the district’s approach achieves better balance between the campuses that are under capacity and those like Arcola, which has been “busting at the seams for over 10 years.”
“It’s hard not to be a little bit intrigued and sort of happy that they’re having these hard conversations, because I do think that there’s a benefit for a school like ours,” she said.
Fifth grade teacher Karen McKiernan has worked in a portable classroom for a decade. She doesn’t see that changing soon, as large numbers of families flock to Arcola.
For her, it’s not necessarily a bad deal. Sure, she doesn’t have much storage space or running water. But she can control her classroom temperature and works hard to make the space feel homey.
“We just do our best,” she said, “with our fake walls.”
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