Development not cause of overcrowded schools

Restricting new development in a county with only 335 permits in 2022 will only exasperate the housing affordability problems in Baltimore County without having any meaning ful impact on school overcrowding.

Anyone reading The Baltimore Sun over the last few days may have noticed a debate between Baltimore County Councilman David Marks of District 5 and David Plymyer, a retired attorney for Anne Arundel County, regarding the impact of development on Baltimore County schools (“Adequate public facilities law: Easy to knock, harder to fix,” July 20). The debate concerns implementing the adequate public facilities ordinance (APFO) restrictions on new residential development as the solution to overcrowding at approximately one-quarter of public schools. There’s one major problem with this assessment: Limiting development won’t do anything to relieve school overcrowding.

According to a recent Baltimore Sun article (“The Baltimore region is building fewer homes. That’s a problem,” July 18), Baltimore County last year approved a meager 335 new housing permits, which is well below the 10-year average of 1,241 permits annually. During the same year, Prince George’s County, which has a comparable population, approved nearly 6,000 building permits. Development is rapidly declining in Baltimore County and only contributes a negligible number of new students each year.

Restricting new development in a county with only 335 permits in 2022 will only exasperate the housing affordability problems in Baltimore County without having any meaningful impact on school overcrowding. Montgomery County recently came to this conclusion and in 2020 substantially revised their restrictive APFO regulations after realizing that they were stifling economic development and contributing to skyrocketing rents and housing prices.

The real cause of school overcrowding in Baltimore County is household turnover. The best schools attract young families to their districts who can utilize those schools. After the kids graduate, those families often relocate to other areas knowing that their house is more valuable because of the good schools and that they can live with less space.

Those houses are then again purchased by young families intending to use the good schools. This creates a cycle where the best performing schools have high demand and the worst performing schools do not. The obvious solution is school redistricting but the school board chooses not to take on that fight, despite the fact that our schools are on average undercapacity countywide. Currently, countywide capacity for elementary schools is 90.9%, middle schools are 88.2% and high schools are at 100.5%. Redistricting is never a popular solution, as it is a political hot potato for politicians and school board members, and it’s always easiest to capitulate to the loudest voices.

But APFO restrictions will not solve the school overcrowding problem. They will, however, exacerbate an already dire housing shortage and affordability crisis and, importantly, they ignore the voices of all those striving to achieve homeownership and bring vibrancy to a shrinking Baltimore County. The only meaningful solutions to school overcrowding are building more capacity or better utilizing the capacity we have through redistricting. Lastly, I will point out that the county school board has stated that their multiyear improvement plan will address overcapacity issues by 2026.