By Adam Pagnucco.
Save Wootton, a stakeholder coalition formed to prevent the closure of Wootton High School, has announced that it has filed complaints with state and county inspectors general as well as the Maryland State Department of Education claiming irregularities in MCPS’s process to determine the fate of the school. The group has also announced a legal defense fund “managed by the newly-formed non-profit, the Community and Education Policy Alliance (CEPA,) with plans to sue over multiple aspects of the mismanaged decision-making process.”
Save Wootton’s press release is printed below.
*****
Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 12, 2026
“Save Wootton” Files County and State Inspector General Complaint, as well as Maryland State Department of Education Complaint Alleging Irregularities in Crown High School Boundary Process; Legal Defense Launched
ROCKVILLE, Md. — The community organization “Save Wootton” (savewootton.org) announced today that it has filed a formal complaint with the Montgomery County Office of the Inspector General and with the Maryland Office of the Inspector General for Education, as well as with the Maryland State Department of Education, requesting an independent investigation into planning decisions related to the Crown High School boundary study conducted by Montgomery County Public Schools.
The complaint raises concerns that the Superintendent’s recommended “Modified Option H” may have been advanced through a process that lacked required planning analysis and transparency.
Under the Plan, clusters from Thomas S. Wootton High School are dismantled and sent elsewhere, while remaining students would be sent to a new building in a different city — Crown High School — and the existing Wootton facility would be repurposed as a temporary “swing” or holding school without a concrete timeline or duration. Community members say the proposal would effectively eliminate Wootton as a comprehensive neighborhood high school and fragment the existing Wootton cluster.
Key Concerns Raised in the Complaint
The complaint asks the Inspector General to review several issues related to the boundary study and capital planning process, including:
- Material Exceedance of Board-Approved Boundary Study Scope as the recommendation exceeds Board’s own The October 30, 2025 amendment that authorized only the consideration of Crown High School as temporary holding space.
- Possible predetermined decision-making in the boundary study process prior to completion of the public engagement phase.
- Potential misuse or recharacterization of state-approved capital funding for the new Crown High School project.
- Failure to conduct transportation, infrastructure, environmental, and safety analyses typically associated with major public infrastructure decisions.
- Potential reliance on flawed or incomplete enrollment projections, including modeling that may not account for significant new housing development within the Wootton cluster.
- Possible waste or inefficient use of public infrastructure, including repurposing an existing high school facility for indefinite temporary use.
- Inadequate documentation and administrative record supporting a major structural change to the county’s high school system.
- Defacto school closure, constituting a functional discontinuance of a comprehensive high school under Md. Educ. § 4-109 and COMAR 13A.02.09.
“Independent review by the Inspector General would help restore public confidence that planning decisions of this scale are being made transparently and based on complete and accurate information,” says Elisa Sukhobok.
Public Impact
The proposed restructuring would affect thousands of students in the Wootton cluster and surrounding communities as part of the boundary process for the new Crown High School facility currently under construction in the Gaithersburg–Rockville corridor.
The Inspector General’s office is responsible for investigating allegations of waste, mismanagement, and misconduct involving county government operations.
Legal Defense Fund Launched
As more information has emerged about the way the boundary study has been conducted, the more MOCO voters and parents are alarmed over changes in project scope and vast structural changes to the entire school system. What began as a routine “boundary study” has transmogrified into a complete overhaul of the County school framework. It now includes school closures, elimination of the successful IB down-county consortium with untested “regional” programming, incoherent transportation analyses, and bizarre data enrollment projections at variance not only with historic housing patterns but basic common sense. The irregular nature of the process and its lack of transparency have caused the community to spend thousands of volunteer hours investigating the data and the underlying assumptions associated with a broken decision-making process. This has led community-based groups to launch a Legal Defense Fund managed by the newly-formed non-profit, the Community and Education Policy Alliance (CEPA,) with plans to sue over multiple aspects of the mismanaged decision-making process.
Contributions to support the CEPA legal defense fund at: savewootton.org.