Montgomery County designated the Piney Branch watershed a Special Protection Area for its "unusually high water quality" and "fragile ecosystem." Wootton ES Site #7 sits entirely inside it, the only Board of Education land that does. Twice, the Board of Education has let a future school site go under a perpetual easement that rules out building on it. MCPS's own 2028 plan lists both. Here is the record, and what it means for Site #7.
Narrated, 4 min 20 s. Where the Special Protection Area starts and ends, how a conservation easement works, and the two sites the Board has already protected.Download (MP4) · Captions
A County designation for watersheds where streams and wetlands are of unusually high quality and ordinary development would damage them.
In 1994 the County Council created the Special Protection Area program. There are five SPAs in the County. Piney Branch, the stream that rises in and around our neighborhoods and runs south to the Potomac, is one of them. The County's own plan for the area says why.
Potomac Subregion Master Plan, Approved and Adopted April 2002, Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, pages 16 and 17. Still the governing plan for this area.
"Montgomery County designated the Piney Branch subwatershed as an SPA due to its unusually high water quality, fragile ecosystem, and the existing and proposed high-density development (including mixed uses and TDR receiving areas) planned for the headwaters."
The headwaters are here. The Willows of Potomac, which includes Site #7, was built as one of those TDR receiving areas.
We laid the County's parcel outline over the County's SPA boundary and hydrology. These are the results.
Plat 19721, Willows of Potomac, recorded May 23, 1995. Highlights ours. The 1992 easement itself is Liber 10621 Folio 49, Percontee, Inc. to the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission.
The same Planning Board approval that set aside 12 acres for a school (Condition 12) also required a perpetual conservation easement over the stream buffers (Condition 9). The easement's stated purpose: "to maintain scenic views, natural conditions, open spaces, green areas, animal refuges and natural habitat and flora and fauna." It sits on the homeowner association land along Site #7's north and east lines, around the pond. The school site itself was left out of it, because it was meant for a school.
From Montgomery Planning's own description of the SPA law. These apply to public agencies, not only private developers.
The SPA law does not forbid a bus depot. It puts every acre of pavement and every tree in front of the Planning Board, in public, before anything is built. A forested headwater site paved for hundreds of buses would have to pass that review.
Two future school sites in MCPS's own 2028 plan carry the same conclusion: under perpetual easement, cannot be used for school development. Here is how they got there.
Board of Education of Montgomery County, approved minutes of January 11, 2011, Resolution No. 19-11, pages 19 and 20. Adopted unanimously. Published by MCPS at montgomeryschoolsmd.org.
"WHEREAS, The Memorandum of Understanding acknowledged that the Briggs Chaney Road site ... qualifies as a land bank within the Special Protection Area; and WHEREAS, The Memorandum of Understanding included a requirement to execute a Conservation Easement Agreement to protect and prevent any alteration, construction, or destruction of sensitive environmental areas consisting of forest, wetlands, and stream valley buffers contained in an easement grant of 20.37 acres to the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission"
The Briggs Chaney Road site was what Site #7 is today: a future school site the Board had held for years, inside a Special Protection Area, the Upper Paint Branch. In 2010 the Board signed a memorandum of understanding with M-NCPPC. In January 2011 it voted, unanimously, to give M-NCPPC a perpetual conservation easement over 20.37 of the site's 20.96 acres. The Board got something for it: credit toward its own water quality and forest obligations for a school project in the same watershed. The watershed got the land, for good.
How it connects: the Board owns one piece of land inside the Piney Branch SPA. It is Site #7. The instrument it used in 2011 is the instrument that fits here.
MCPS Superintendent's Recommended FY2028 Capital Budget and Amendments to the FY2027 to 2032 CIP, Appendix I, Future School Sites, October 2026, page 4.
"* Site under perpetual Special Protection Area easement, cannot be used for school development."
Site #7 appears higher on the same page, in the plain list of Board-owned future school sites. The two sites at the bottom are in their own section, "Board of Education-owned sites under perpetual easement." The second of them, the former Farquhar Middle School site, got its easement a different way: in 2014 MCPS built the new Farquhar on parkland that carried a Rural Open Space easement, the Planning Board released that easement on the new school's footprint, and a replacement easement went onto the old school property. A trade. Either way, the result is the same line in the book.
The 2002 Potomac Subregion Master Plan, on what should happen to school sites the Board does not need, and to forest along Piney Branch.
"If the Board of Education determines that existing sites are not needed for schools, those sites provide opportunities to serve other public purposes identified in this Plan. Surplus school sites should be evaluated for their potential to serve unmet recreational needs, environmental objectives, affordable housing goals, or other public purposes requiring vacant land."
"Re-use surplus school sites as parks."
A bus depot is not on the list.
"Acquire the vacant school site, parcel P160, along the mainstem of Piney Branch and adjacent to Circle Drive as a conservation addition to the Glen Hills Local Park to protect scarce and important forest areas along this tributary."
The County has already written down, for this very stream, that a vacant school site is worth more as protected forest. Site #7 is 12 acres of forest at the head of the same stream.