The proposed construction - the system's capital improvement program calls for building at least four new schools in the next five years - won't immediately address the space needs confronting the system's students, said Karen Reilly, the mother of a Boonsboro Middle School student.
Reilly's son is a sixth-grader at Boonsboro Middle, where the first lunch of the eight-period day is served at 10:30 a.m. Reilly, a member of the Washington County Board of Education's facilities enrollment committee, said that adding portable classrooms - the system now has 67 - is only an imperfect fix.
"But again, the wall that you run into, yeah, you can have portables up the ying-yang, you can put portables on the soccer field or wherever, but first of all ... the portables don't have bathrooms. But more importantly, you have to bring the kids through the cafeteria for lunch," Reilly said.
Green said he opted to build plywood walls in Boonsboro High's open-space areas and move lockers to make room for classrooms and save money. In one area, only thin fabric and a metal divider and bookcase separate students in a Spanish class from those in a U.S. history class.
