For Immediate Release: Friday, April 29, 2016
The Montgomery County Council’s Health and Human Services (HHS) Committee and its Education Committee will meet jointly at 9:30 a.m. on Friday, April 29, will hold a worksession on a proposal to add a child care center at Burtonsville Elementary School. The joint committee also will discuss the Weekend Food Bags/Smartsacks program.
The HHS Committee, which is chaired by Councilmember George Leventhal and includes Councilmembers Roger Berliner and Craig Rice, and the Education Committee, which is chaired by Councilmember Rice and includes Councilmembers Marc Elrich and Nancy Navarro, will meet in the Seventh Floor Hearing Room of the Council Office Building at 100 Maryland Ave. in Rockville. The meeting will be televised live by County Cable Montgomery (CCM—Cable Channel 6 on Comcast and RCN, Channel 30 on Verizon) and also will be available via streaming through the Council web site at http://tinyurl.com/z9982v8 .
Adding a child care center at Burtonsville Elementary School, as was proposed by County Executive Ike Leggett in his Fiscal Years 2017-22 six-year Capital Improvements Program, was originally was estimated to cost $505,000. However, a review of the project, with adjustments, later estimated the cost to be $860,000.
The joint committee also will consider the recommendation from Councilmembers Berliner, Leventhal, and Rice to place $150,000 on the budget reconciliation list to begin implementing a strategy to substantially increase the number of children served by the Weekend Food Bag/SmartSacks program.
Food insecurity is a significant problem for many school-aged children in Montgomery County. Currently, about 29,300 MCPS elementary school students, or just under 40 percent of total elementary school enrollment, qualify for free and reduced meals. For some of the children, weekends and school vacations mean that meals may be missed or that the amount of food their families can provide is not sufficient to meet their needs.
One way that they are helped is through the weekend food bag, or Smartsacks, program. Three of the County’s non-profit partners—Manna Food Center, KIND and Women Who Care Ministries—work to provide weekend food to more than 4,600 children. They do so with a combination of private donations and County funding and with the help of volunteers who bag and deliver food.
At 2:15 p.m. in the Third Floor Conference Room, the Government Operations and Fiscal Policy Committee, which is chaired by Councilmember Navarro and includes Councilmembers Sidney Katz and Hans Riemer, will address a number of budget requests included in County Executive Leggett’s Fiscal Year 2017 operating budget.
Among the programs the committee will review is the County’s MC311 centralized call center. The call center currently has a capacity of 168 simultaneous calls, which can handle the volume on most routine days. However, the capacity was overwhelmed in January by the volume of calls that were placed during a major snowstorm.
# # # # Release ID: 16-138