Guest column by Marissa Valeri, Councilmember, City of Rockville.
Montgomery County calls itself a leader on educational equity. The budget currently before the County Council will test whether that’s true.
Twinbrook Elementary School serves 461 students in Rockville. Seventy percent qualify for free or reduced-price meals — nearly double the countywide average of 37%. More than four in ten are Emerging Multilingual Learners. Only 22% are proficient in math and reading. It is the only Title I and Community School in the entire Richard Montgomery cluster, which has no School-Based Health and Wellness Center and no dedicated behavioral health staff. One school counselor serves all 461 students. There is no margin there — and no backup.
Right now, Twinbrook gets a few hours of therapy a week — borrowed time from a care manager based at a different school. That is not a safety net. It is a gesture.
The fix isn’t complicated, and it isn’t expensive. Councilmember Sidney Katz is requesting $200,000 — half the cost of a full Linkages to Learning program — to place one Family Care Manager and one Child Therapist at Twinbrook. This “Half Linkages” model isn’t experimental: it’s already working at Greencastle Elementary and Silver Spring International Middle School. It would serve 20 students per month in behavioral health support and 32 families per month in case management. It’s an operating budget request — no capital investment required.
The disparity is hard to look away from. Linkages to Learning’s own placement criteria target schools with FARMS rates above 60%. Twinbrook exceeds that threshold by more than ten points. Yet the Richard Montgomery cluster has zero Linkages sites — while comparable communities elsewhere in the county have seven.
The City of Rockville has already shown what municipal commitment to this work looks like. We are the only municipality in Montgomery County to directly fund a Linkages to Learning site — at Maryvale Elementary. We did that because we believe wraparound services are infrastructure, not a luxury. But a city government cannot and should not be the backstop for a County responsibility. Twinbrook deserves the same investment the County has made elsewhere.
The numbers inside Twinbrook Elementary don’t emerge from nowhere — they are a direct reflection of the neighborhood surrounding the school. According to the City of Rockville’s own disparity mapping analysis, 44.16% of children under the age of five in Twinbrook live in poverty. The Hispanic and Latino poverty rate exceeds 41% — identified as a statistical outlier against a citywide range of 0 to 20%, and the highest concentration of Hispanic/Latino poverty anywhere in the city. Median household incomes in Twinbrook tracts fall as low as $64,528 — the lowest in Twinbrook by a significant margin. More than a quarter of residents speak English less than very well, and uninsured rates in surrounding census tracts reach nearly 17%. But official poverty statistics still undercount this fragility.
Consider a family of four earning $45,000 in Twinbrook: they don’t appear in federal poverty counts, but they almost certainly can’t afford a therapist, miss work when a child has a mental health crisis, and have no idea how to navigate a system where everything is in English and costs money upfront. FARMS eligibility — which extends to 185% of the poverty line — catches families like this. The federal poverty line doesn’t.
That gap is exactly the population an on-site care manager and therapist are designed to reach. When we fail to fund that access, we don’t just fall short on a budget line. We break a promise.
This is $200,000 to bring a proven program to children who meet every standard for need and have been passed over twice in the CIP process. The Education and Culture Committee and the Health and Human Services Committee have a straightforward opportunity to back Montgomery County’s stated values with action.
I urge them to take it.
Marissa Valeri is a Councilmember with the City of Rockville, Maryland.
Sources
Katz, Sidney. Request for Support to Fund Linkages to Learning Functions at Twinbrook Elementary School. Office of Councilmember District 3, Montgomery County Council. April 27, 2026.
Research Division, Community Planning and Development Services, City of Rockville.
Mapping Disparity in the City of Rockville. April 2024. https://arcg.is/0zOWjO