Analysis
Resources, provision, and context across MCPS schools
These pages cover resource allocation, school provision, policy benchmarks, and context. Public data suppresses small groups and omits detail such as disability category and service intensity, so the pages show the patterns the data can support and note where it runs out.
Budget and staffing trends
Per-pupil spending across three decades in constant DC-area dollars, staffing intensity, and compensation costs against the regional labor market.
Real per-pupil spending grew for decades, fell after 2008, and only regained its FY2009 level in the 2020s.
Budget equity: the school-level view
Do lower-income schools get more staff and money per student? School-by-school staffing and per-pupil spending, read alongside county OLO Report 2026-9.
Lower-income schools run ~1,200 extra professional positions; per-pupil spending rises with school poverty at every level.
Special education provision
IEP/SWD and 504 identification, inclusion/LRE, SPED staffing, and apparent caseload, without ranking schools by SWD achievement gaps.
Special education provision varies across MCPS schools
Staffing and student need
Enrollment-adjusted staffing trends, staffing mix, and how resource allocation lines up with school need.
Classroom teacher staffing fell faster than enrollment while support roles grew
School capacity outlook
Ten-year probabilistic enrollment forecasts checked against each school's capacity — which schools are likely to run out of seats, when, and how confident the model is.
29 schools projected over capacity by 2030–31, 23 of them severely.
School consolidation: the data
For every elementary and middle school: enrollment, capacity, building condition, feeder patterns, and capital plans — the factors MCPS's consolidation study says it will weigh, with no score attached.
55 elementary and 13 middle schools project under MCPS's 80% floor by 2030.
Boundary & consolidation sandbox
Close or consolidate schools, unpair paired elementaries, and redraw attendance block by block — and watch enrollment, utilization, FARMS, and diversity shift live.
A sandbox, not a proposal — modeled 2030 baseline, best on a desktop screen.
Why enrollment is falling
What's behind the county-wide enrollment decline — smaller kindergarten classes, families moving, pre-K policy — and how much new housing offsets it. Refreshed each year.
Down about 4.3k more by 2030–31 even after new housing — most of it fewer births, locked in.
Class size vs MCPS targets
Reported class sizes compared with MCPS class-size targets, separated by elementary and secondary context.
Reported class sizes run below MCPS's own targets in every category
Achievement in context
Income, economic disadvantage, multilingual learners, disabilities, and absenteeism as context for achievement comparisons.
Student needs, not neighborhood income, explain school score differences
Explorer
Income and housing map
The attendance-zone map remains available as a geographic explorer for income, home values, poverty, and education.
How to read these pages
- Neighborhood measures describe attendance areas, not necessarily enrolled students.
- Suppressed values are withheld for privacy and should not be read as zero.
- Cross-school patterns are observational; they do not prove what caused an outcome.
- Headlines and numbers come from generated bundle artifacts, not hand-entered page copy.
Source: MSDE, MCPS School Profiles, U.S. Census ACS, analytics bundle · Updated: 2025 / 2024