Some Prince George’s County School students are being relocated for the next three years as reconstruction on four schools begins, causing some parents to question long-standing equity issues and challenging the school system to find new ways to address the issues.

Four middle schools: Drew-Freeman, Hyattsville, Kenmoor and Walker Mill are all under reconstruction after a billion-dollar maintenance and new school construction backlog. These schools have been plagued with overcrowding, mold, and cracks in the foundations for decades.

“For whatever reason in this school system and in this county have not built schools as fast as we probably should have or could have,” Mark Fossett, an associate superintendent for county schools, told parents at a town hall last month.

The issue of outdated crumbling school infrastructure is now being swapped for a bigger one: how to equitably relocate students into swing space, or extra temporary classroom space, especially coming off of a year of COVID and remote learning where many students — especially Brown and Black students — fell behind academically?

Parents say the school system is playing a big game of chess with little pre-planning, and pitting school communities against each other.

For instance, Hyattsville Middle School parents were told earlier this year their children would be moving to the Robert Goddard Montessori School because that could accommodate their 900 students. To make that work, Robert Goddard’s 490 students would move to an old school building in Bowie (about 7 miles away) where renovations would be made to accommodate them.

Robert Goddard parents and students didn’t take well to the idea of relocating, nor did they want to share their space, so they held a protest in March in front of the county school headquarters in Upper Marlboro.

“I feel like we’ve just been punched in the stomach. Like a serious sucker punch here,” Erica Edelen-Barnes, a mom to former and current Robert Goddard students, told DCist/WAMU during the protest.

Edelen-Barnes said they found out from a Facebook post that they were being relocated to an old school building in Bowie to make room for Hyattsville students.

“We would think the process would have included talking to the parents and the community members about what was happening as opposed to just slid it under the radar or something and thought oh it’s going to be okay we’re just going to uproot you. It’s a pandemic, I mean come on,” she said.

A day later, the county school reversed the decision to the cheers of Robert Goddard parents, but telling parents at Hyattsville Middle, a Title One school with more than 75% of students on free and reduced meals, that their kids would be divided into two schools. This would require some students to take a more than 60 minute bus ride to school.

Catarina Correia, president of the Hyattsville parent-teacher association and mom to a seventh grader, told DCist/WAMU that she was disappointed with the parents at Robert Goddard.

“I don’t want to be rude, but they used their privilege and connections to put their needs above the needs of other people in the community,” Correia said.

She said the Hyattsville students — the majority who are Latino — have already had a tough time this past year between COVID and remote learning.

“The public schools should be addressing the needs of the most at-risk students. It should be addressing the needs of those that need it most,” Correia said.  “And that’s what I want to see it doing. I don’t want to see it catering to people that are already privileged.”

But the issues facing these parents and students aren’t new to the school system.

Decades-Old Equity Issues

Prince George’s schools have been historically underfunded. Angela Simms, a sociology professor at Barnard College, did her doctoral dissertation on the various inequities in the county, including schools.

“The point of the dissertation was to situate Prince George’s County with its neighbors and to think about the scarcity the Black middle class manages even as it has a class advantage and what that tells us about racialized capitalism and the history of policies that have discriminated against Black folk,” Simms told DCist/WAMU.

She says racialized capitalism and discriminatory policies have led to the county’s Black residents to fight over resources and shoulder the region’s Latino student population, with the fourth highest number of unaccompanied minors in the country.

“And so for many Black parents, ‘like, darn it, I pay my taxes, I want to go to high quality school’ so they leverage their resources, their political savvy and influence to ensure their access to those schools,” Simms says.

As a matter of fact, Robert Goddard Montessori spends almost $20,000 per pupil; whereas, Hyattsville Middle spends roughly $14,000 per pupil.

“Part of it is like, look up, look up to where the resources could be flowing from. But rather than more resources coming in, you’re fighting over scraps,” Simms says. “Ultimately, Prince George’s County is caught in a budget vice — on one side squeezed by inadequate revenue and on the other squeezed by disproportionate demand from high-needs students.”

Simms says she hopes the statewide $4 billion education reform effort and new school funding formula will be the catalyst for change. The plan includes things like free full-day preschool for three- and four-year-olds, raising teacher pay and creating new standards for college and career readiness. She adds that the only way to level the playing field for students and parents would be to raise taxes and fund schools equally.

County Schools, Parents Seek Solutions

In the short term, the school system says they’re going to move sixth grade Hyattsville Middle students to Thomas Stone Elementary School in nearby Mount Rainier, install 10 modulars, or RVs, at the Robert Goddard School, and have seventh and eighth grade Hyattsville students attend the school with Goddard students, but only after October, at best, or winter break, at worst. This still means Hyattsville Middle students will be divided and distributed into three schools starting the fall: Thomas Stone, Robert Goddard, and the old school building in Bowie.

Meanwhile parents at Hyattsville Middle and other schools undergoing reconstruction are forming a coalition that will meet with CEO of Schools Monica Goldson once a month. Parents also want to make sure that funding for swing space is put into the schools capital budget because they realize this issue of needing space could last a decade, with other schools needing reconstruction.

“We want to make sure that this doesn’t happen to other parents down the line,” Catarina Correia says.

As for the school system, two new schools are being constructed to alleviate overcrowding issues. School officials said in a statement that they’re also looking at “cost-effective” ways to create more space, including leasing empty private school buildings, constructing new swing space, and using existing commercial or county-owned properties.