Montgomery County’s high schools had 50,864 students during the 2025-2026 school year. They had capacity for 50,969. That means the system had exactly 105 more seats than students. At first, that sounds like MCPS had managed to fill its high schools almost perfectly. Then I went school by school and did the subtraction myself. Using Appendix E of the MCPS capital-improvements plan, I subtracted each high school’s enrollment from its listed capacity.
Eleven schools were over capacity by a combined 2,870 students. The other 14 had a combined 2,975 unused seats.
The difference between those totals is 105.
So MCPS didn’t really have only a 105-seat issue. It had almost 2,900 students attending overcrowded schools while almost 3,000 seats sat somewhere else.
That calculation is not an MCPS headline. I derived it from the district’s own table.
Because I attend Walter Johnson, one row obviously caught my attention. Walter Johnson had 3,011 students in a building with a listed capacity of 2,251. That put it 760 students over capacity, or at roughly 134% utilization. Anyone who attends WJ already knows the school feels crowded. The hallways, lunch spaces and packed common areas aren’t exactly hidden. What surprised me was seeing how much open space existed elsewhere in the county.
Wheaton was 469 students over capacity. Einstein was 319 over, Blair was 307 over and Churchill was 229 over. At the same time, Sherwood had 474 open seats. Kennedy had 398, Springbrook had 306, Wootton had 299 and Watkins Mill had 280. For every net seat the high-school system lacked, around 27 students were attending a school above its listed capacity. MCPS can’t pick up 760 Walter Johnson students and drop them into any building with open seats.
Montgomery County is large. Transportation matters. Specialized programs attract students across normal boundaries. Families also build their routines and sometimes choose their homes around an assigned school. A cluster is the group of elementary and middle schools that feeds into one high school. It’s a real community, not just a collection of numbers. I stopped seeing this as a simple shortage of classrooms. If MCPS simply lacked classrooms, the answer would be straightforward: build more.
The harder problem is that many of the available classrooms are not where the students are.
The district’s 2031-2032 projections make the mismatch even clearer. After approved projects, including the reopening of Charles W. Woodward High School, MCPS expects to have capacity for 54,760 high school students. It projects enrollment of 49,857. That would leave a countywide surplus of about 4,903 seats and put the system at approximately 91% utilization. Yet four schools would still be overcrowded. Blake is projected to reach 116% utilization, Churchill 113%, Paint Branch 108% and Wheaton 105%. Together, those schools would remain 809 students over capacity.
I calculated the next figure the same way I calculated the current one. If MCPS has a net surplus of 4,903 seats while four schools are a combined 809 students over capacity, then the schools below capacity would collectively contain roughly 5,712 unused seats. MCPS could therefore create almost 5,000 more seats than it needs and still leave hundreds of students in overcrowded schools.
That is the difference between adding space and putting space where it is useful.
An empty seat in one building can’t always solve crowding somewhere else. A seat in Olney doesn’t help a Bethesda student if the bus ride becomes unreasonable. A school’s listed capacity also doesn’t perfectly measure its hallways, cafeteria or specialized classrooms. Boundary changes are disruptive too. Families may have siblings at the same school, long-standing activities or transportation plans that depend on the current assignment. Programs complicate the picture further. Magnets, IB programs and career academies attract students from outside the usual attendance area. Adding or moving one program can change enrollment even without moving a neighborhood boundary.
The goal shouldn’t be to force every school to exactly 100%. But the county shouldn’t treat every building as an isolated system either. If MCPS responds to every overcrowding problem by constructing another addition, it may create expensive permanent space in one location just as enrollment begins shifting somewhere else. The Woodward reopening project has total projected expenditures of roughly $224 million. It includes much more than a few classrooms, so that number shouldn’t be treated as a normal price per seat.
It still shows how large these decisions are. Before spending that amount of money, the county should at least prove that the space it already owns can’t be used more effectively.
In March 2026, the Board of Education approved new secondary-school boundaries connected to Woodward and Crown, along with a more regional approach to specialized programs. The changes are expected to begin during the 2027-2028 school year. I think the program decisions might matter almost as much as the boundary changes. Changing a boundary tells some families they must attend another school. Placing a strong academic or career program in a building with open space gives students a reason to choose it.
That can make an underused school more attractive instead of treating it as a place where students are simply being sent to solve a numbers problem. There’s a risk, though. MCPS could place programs in underused schools and make some students travel much farther because their local building is crowded. Every proposal should therefore include the effect on student commute times, not just capacity and demographics. I think the Board should add an “allocation before construction” rule to its facilities policy.
Whenever a high school remains above 110% capacity for two years, MCPS would have to compare three options publicly before approving a major construction project: adjusting boundaries, moving or creating a regional program, or building an addition or new school. For each option, the district should publish the cost, number of students affected, expected transportation changes, demographic effects and projected utilization five years later. That wouldn’t mean boundary changes always win. Sometimes construction really is the fairest and least disruptive option.
The point is that MCPS should have to show its work.
Students close to graduation should be allowed to remain at their current schools after a boundary change. But even that has a cost. Grandfathering juniors and seniors can mean running overlapping bus routes and two boundary systems for several years. MCPS should publish that cost instead of acting as though grandfathering is free.
Before I looked at the data, I thought the capacity problem was mostly that certain neighborhoods had grown faster than MCPS could build. That’s still part of it. But the more interesting answer is that MCPS can be full and empty at the same time. Students at crowded schools deal with packed hallways, strained common spaces and competition for popular classes. Students at significantly underused schools may have fewer course sections or activities because there aren’t enough students to support them.
Overcrowding is worse, but neither situation is good.
The county isn’t just deciding how many seats to build. It’s deciding whether all its high schools are part of one shared system or whether an empty seat becomes almost untouchable once it sits on the other side of a boundary.