Redistricting possible as Sykesville Middle and Freedom Elementary construction plans advance

Plans to add 13 classrooms to Sykesville Middle and five classrooms to Freedom Elementary were approved by the Carroll County Board of Education last week. Construction for each project is slated to begin in June 2026, according to approved educational specifications for each addition.

The projects are intended to be a first step in addressing overcrowding in the southern Carroll County schools caused by growing enrollment and are based on recommendations from the Southern Area Redistricting Committee, Facilities Planner William Caine told the school board at their meeting Aug. 14. Both schools are in Sykesville.

“The monkey wrench, the problem, is that Blueprint compliance could potentially alter staffing,” Caine said.

The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future is a multibillion-dollar statewide public school reform effort designed to make Maryland’s schools among the highest performing in the country by expanding prekindergarten, directing more resources to schools with higher concentrations of poverty, and increasing teacher salaries, among other ambitious initiatives.

Although Carroll’s southern area has a faster-growing population, the Blueprint is projected to require that the school system provide more teachers to schools in the northwestern region of the county, where more students receive free and reduced-price meals.

“Blueprint is going to play a big part of this down the road, moving teachers around,” Board of Education President Marsha Herbert said, “but we definitely need to move on with these two projects.”

The $17.7 million Sykesville Middle project will add or renovate 49,150 square feet of space at the school, increasing capacity by 250 students to a total of 970, according to the specifications . Enrollment is projected to grow to 943 students by 2033, but Caine said the extra capacity will accommodate anomalously large cohorts of students. Sykesville Middle was 28 students over capacity (104%) during the 2022-23 school year, according to the system’s capital budget plan . The project is expected to be complete by summer 2028.

The $7.2 million Freedom Elementary project will add 112 seats and 4,500 square feet to the school, for a total capacity of 637 students, but enrollment at the school is projected to be around 673 students by the time the project is finished in summer of 2027, according to the specifications. Freedom Elementary was 92 students over capacity (117%) during the 2022-23 school year, according to the system’s capital budget plan. One of the five new classrooms will be designated for prekindergarten.

Enrollment and capacity data will be reassessed when the projects are complete, Superintendent Cynthia McCabe said, especially since Freedom Elementary’s enrollment is likely to have grown to exceed the additional space provided by the expansion.

“You have to start somewhere,” Assistant Superintendent of Operations Jon O’Neal said, “so we’re going to do these two things and then we’ll see.”

One solution for Freedom would be to retain portable classrooms at the elementary school after the addition is completed, which board member Patricia Dorsey said is not ideal.

“At the beginning of the plan, we were thinking that by adding these classrooms onto the building that we wouldn’t need the portable there,” Dorsey said, “We’ve got all these moving parts that I see as a real challenge, and I don’t see Freedom being satisfied appropriately, even with the additions.”

Board of Education Vice President Tara Battaglia said she also dislikes relying on portable classrooms, but the alternative prospect of redistricting is wildly unpopular among residents.

“The community has made it very, very, very well-known they don’t want to redistrict,” Battaglia said. “Like, ‘Do not redistrict us. Do what you need to do to figure it out, but don’t redistrict us. We like where we are.’ Personally, I hate the portables. I think they are a safety issue in this day and age. We try to do away with them and only use them as needed. I’m not proposing anything at this moment, but I do think we need to go ahead with the plan, because of pre-K, particularly. We need to make sure that’s in place, per Blueprint, but maybe once all is said and done, we might have to look at redistricting at that point.”

Building a new school would be popular with the community, Battaglia added, but is not a viable option because the school system does not have the land to build on or the means to execute such a project.

Coordinating school construction amid fluctuating enrollment and Blueprint-prescribed staffing adjustments is like building an airplane while in flight, board member Donna Sivigny said.

“We felt like these two things had to be done as initial steps,” Sivigny said. “They’re going to have to be done in order to not have to move massive swaths of kids in a redistricting effort. That doesn’t mean that, after we get done with this, that there still won’t have to be minor redistricting associated with it, because things have changed in the meantime, but we felt like these had to be done as early steps right to fix the problem.”

The county will pay for about $4.1 million of the Freedom Elementary project and $8.7 million of the Sykesville Middle project, with the state supplying the rest. Each project is included in the system’s long-range capital plan and has been approved by county commissioners, McCabe said.

The school board decided in 2023 to prioritize construction projects at Liberty High, Sykesville Middle, Freedom Elementary, Cranberry Station Elementary, Friendship Valley Elementary, Sandymount Elementary and Taneytown Elementary schools in the 2025 capital budget . While Liberty’s inclusion was largely because the school was determined to be the most out-of-date in the county, additions at each of the other four elementary schools will support Blueprint’s prekindergarten requirements.