Home Care In Rockville, VA

Wood enthusiasts interested in sourcing timber from local trees will have a chance this weekend, when the Montgomery County parks department hosts its third annual urban wood sale, offering buyers the chance to purchase wood salvaged from area trees.

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Among the offerings — walnut, cherry, poplar, oak, mulberry, cypress and ash, according to a Montgomery Parks statement — will be celebrity timber: wood salvaged from Maryland’s historic Linden Oak, thought to have been more than 300 years old when it was felled in July.

Hundreds of failing trees are removed from Montgomery County each year, officials said — recycled into wood chips, mulch and firewood through county programs. The wood at the sale — kiln-dried, planed or air-dried — will be sold in slabs of different lengths and thicknesses ranging from three-quarters of an inch to three inches.

Montgomery Parks Urban Forester Patrick Harwood said the sale raised $45,000 for the agency last year, when about 500 customers purchased approximately 20,000 board feet of lumber. (One board foot of lumber is 1 inch thick and 12 inches square.) He said generally walnut is the most expensive and ash or poplar the cheapest.

“We’re not buying the wood. We’re just taking the wood we would normally grind into mulch,” Harwood said. “We’re taking that and just processing it to the highest order of value.”

The remains of the historic, centuries-old Linden Oak tree will also be on offer. Once thought to be Montgomery County’s largest white oak, the tree, which lived at Beach Drive and Rockville Pike in North Bethesda, was said to have been a seedling a generation before George Washington’s birth.

Linden Oak sawed down after standing tall as one of Maryland’s oldest trees

“Everybody and their grandmother is interested in wood from that tree,” Harwood said. Alas, only green wood from the Linden Oak will be available this year, he said — buyers at future sales may be able to purchase wood from the tree that has gone to the kiln.

Tom Darone, president of the Washington Woodworkers Guild, said working with urban wood can have drawbacks. Awkward bends in urban trees can be difficult to work with, and nails — or bullets — embedded in trees can chew up saw blades.

However, some trees such as prized “backyard exotics” — redbud, dogwood, persimmon and smaller fruitwood trees — aren’t on offer at home improvement stores.

“You’re not going to find that in a lumber yard,” he said.

Acorn by acorn, volunteers gather seeds to help save forests

Mike Galvin is the director of the SavATree Consulting Group, who served as the coordinator of a project to reclaim wood from abandoned warehouses and homes in Baltimore. Cities can be the source of quality lumber, he said. Baltimore is the northernmost city where valuable old-growth yellow pine can be salvaged, for example.

“This does not exist in nature anymore,” he said. “If you want it, you’ve got to get it out of those buildings.”

Keeping wood out of landfills benefits the environment, according to Galvin. Just as people enjoy the benefits of living trees — beauty, shade, water filtration, oxygen — trees can continue to benefit people in death by being turned into homes, furniture or even guitars.

Other construction materials, including asphalt and concrete, have a high rate of recycling, Galvin said. Urban wood can, too, and sales like Montgomery County’s help.

“This material — it’s all over the place,” he said. “It’s here and it’s ours.”

The sale will be held Saturday and Sunday from 8 a.m. to noon, or while supplies last, officials said, at the Montgomery Parks Green Farm Maintenance Facility at 8301 Turkey Thicket Drive in Gaithersburg. Prices will vary between $5 and $400, and proceeds will benefit Montgomery Parks’ recycling programs.

A small earthquake in Rockville, Maryland, shook communities and was felt as far away as West Virginia, overnight Tuesday.

The earthquake happened at about 12:50 a.m. and had a magnitude of 2.3, about the same energy release as a bolt of lightning, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS.) The epicenter of the earthquake was near Lakewood Country Club in Rockville.

No damage or injuries have been reported, authorities said.

Did you feel it?

People reported to the USGS that they felt the earthquake in Montgomery, Frederick and Howard counties, and as far as West Virginia. Some weak shaking was reported in Northern Virginia by early morning.

People quickly took to social media to describe what they felt and heard. Some said it woke them up, others were surprised it happened at the start of 2024.

"So there was an earthquake in Rockville, Maryland. That’s 17 miles from me. Is 2024 really starting this way? #Earthquake #DMV," @ScarlettYoli wrote on X.

"Yes I felt it and I live in Rockville. I heard it too. Sounded like a train but different," @Nicole01876101 wrote.

"Rattled our house here in Rockville for a few seconds," @JStantonDC wrote.

"Don’t think you could have missed it here in Potomac. It was very loud and lasted about 15 seconds," @RealPotatus.

News4's Joseph Olmo spoke to several people who said they did not feel the earthquake.

“Didn’t feel it… slept right through it," a man said.

“How come I didn't feel it? I felt the last one. Why didn't I feel this one?" a woman said.

“What do you think this says about the start of 2024 if we're already starting off with earthquakes?” Olmo asked.

“Ugh… not good!" a woman said.

“It’s just an earthquake," a man said.

How does it compare to the 2011 earthquake?

The 2024 shaker was much less intense than the damaging 5.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Virginia in 2011.

The 2011 earthquake was a thousand times stronger than the one recorded in Rockville and released as much energy as an average tornado, USGS said. It caused about $200 million to $300 million in damages, including to the Washington Monument and National Cathedral.

Earthquakes on the East Coast are felt differently than those that occur in the west, U.S. Geological Survey scientist Thomas Pratt told NBC Washington when we looked back on the quake.

"Eastern U.S. earthquakes are felt much more widely that the western U.S. because the rocks in the continent are much colder, they’re much older and they’re much stronger," Pratt said. "So, the energy gets transmitted much more effectively."

About a million earthquakes with a 2.3 magnitude are recorded yearly worldwide, according to the USGS.

This is a developing story. Stay with News4 for more updates.

ARLINGTON, VA — Signature Dish, the WETA public television series, kicks off the second half of its second season on Monday by highlighting two restaurants and one food truck that specialize in serving South American food.

"One of the goals is to include just as much variety as possible, so that we can see just how exciting and diverse the D.C. area food scene is," host Seth Tillman told Patch on Thursday. "Sometimes we've focused on foods from a specific country. We've done Korean food, French food, several others. Sometimes we do more of a region, like we've done the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and obviously, in this case, South American."

In the episode entitled "Savoring South America," Tillman first visits the Fire Pit Brazilian BBQ, a Rockville, Maryland-based food truck that serves up Brazilian steakhouse cuisine. He then travels across Montgomery County to Kantutas Bar & Grill in Wheaton to enjoy a big "meat and potatoes-type dish" that is emblematic of a city in Bolivia called Cochabamba.

"It's important to me within that episode to try to showcase the full range of South American cuisine, which also includes, the coast and seafood," he said.

One of the big parts of Peruvian food, which has become well known across the world in recent years, is ceviche.

Find out what's happening in Arlingtonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

"You can get it all over the D.C. area," Tillman said. "But there are some places that have a lot of interesting spins on it, where it's not just the one traditional type of ceviche. Inca Social is very much a place that came to mind and we were very excited to showcase their Ceviche Nikkei."

Despite the fact that WETA calls Arlington its home, Inca Social, which is located in Rosslyn, is only the second Arlington restaurant to appear on Signature Dish.

"We do go all over the entire DMV," Tillman said. "We've been to Alexandria. We've been to a Falls Church. We featured Ruthie's All-Day in our first season, which was also a great restaurant. Hopefully, in season three, we'll get back to Arlington one or two more times."

A native of the D.C. area, Tillman does not consider himself a food reporter by trade. When he first came to WETA in 2016, the first program he produced was a half-hour digest featuring 3-minute vignettes about 12 local restaurants.

"The big shift happened about four years ago," he said. "We kind of made, within the organization, a real commitment to double down on local programming and not just sort of one-off local programming, where you weren't sure on any given week, what you could expect to find on our air."

With the shift in focus on series-based programming, WETA began producing more real estate and neighborhood-focused shows.

"We have a show now called Get Out of Town, which is a weekend getaway type show and we have Signature Dish," Tillman said. "All of these shows, even though they touch on food or travel or real estate, the goal is to learn more about our own local communities and other communities within the DMV."

When asked what were some his favorite restaurants from the first two seasons of Signature Dish, Tillman couldn't just pick one or two.

"I do have very fond memories of our first episode of the series from season one, where we went to Maydan, which is a spectacular restaurant in downtown D.C., where everything's cooked on a giant hearth in the center of the restaurant," he said. "We had a lamb shoulder. It was just spectacular.

"In that same episode, we went to 2fifty Barbecue, which has kind of established itself as sort of the best barbecue spot not only in this region, but really for quite a large radius around us as well."

Signature Dish's "Savoring South America" episode debuts on Monday, March 11, at 9 p.m. on WETA. Host Seth Tillman visits Fire Pit Brazilian BBQ, 804 Rockville Pike in Rockville, Maryland; Kantutas Bar & Grill in Wheaton, Maryland; and Inca Social, 1776 Wilson Blvd. in Arlington, Virginia.

A massive e-commerce fulfillment center, similar to Amazon’s robotics facility near Richmond Raceway, is in the works for a site in northeastern Goochland County about two miles west of Wyndham and Short Pump.

Codenamed “Project Rocky,” the proposed distribution facility would fill 60 acres of a 105-acre site at and around 1990 Ashland Road, between the Martin Marietta and Luck Stone quarries in the county’s Rockville area.

Behind the project is California-based Panattoni Development Co., whose industrial developments include the Virginia I-95 distribution complex that includes an Amazon distribution center.

The Rockville facility, described by county staff as both a fulfillment center and a distribution center, would be similar to “Project Speedway,” the 2.6-million-square-foot facility that Hillwood Enterprises is developing for Amazon north of the raceway.

Despite details suggesting another Amazon facility, the end-user for Project Rocky is officially under wraps.

At a Goochland Planning Commission meeting this month, local Roth Jackson attorney Andy Condlin, who’s representing Panattoni on the project, described the Rockville facility as similar to Project Speedway but said “the ultimate user obviously can change.”

Noting sensitivities involved with an economic development project, Condlin said, “That is something that they’re trying to keep very close to the vest, as far as who that particular user is. But it’s a worldwide user that has a lot of known processes that Panattoni has worked with in the past.”

An aerial view shows the multistory building and parking areas with one of the two nearby quarries visible in the distance.

Responding to speakers in the meeting who questioned the project’s transparency in light of the codename, Condlin said Panattoni had been presented as the developer in a community meeting on the proposal that was held in May.

“This is not a question of trying to figure out who it is,” Condlin said.

Panattoni is seeking to rezone the land from agricultural to industrial use. It’s also applying for a conditional-use permit, which would allow a building height of up to 120 feet.

The center would be built off a 650,000-square-foot footprint, the same footprint as the raceway facility, which Amazon refers to as its RIC4 fulfillment center. The Rockville facility would likewise be a multistory building with an atrium-style interior with robotics on upper floors. The five-story RIC4 is 100 feet at its highest point.

The Rockville facility would include 55 loading docks, 414 trailer parking spaces and 1,720 employee parking spaces, according to county documents. The building and parking would be set back from Ashland Road with landscape buffering, a retention pond and sound walls installed.

A county staff report states the investment in the site “would be well over $500 million.”

The center would employ about 1,000 workers across two shifts and operate 24-7. Peak truck traffic would occur in overnight hours, between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m., and the majority of traffic from trucks and employees is expected to come from Interstate 64 via the Ashland Road interchange.

The project would add traffic signals at the interchange and at its entrance off Ashland Road. The interchange signal, at the I-64 eastbound ramps, is described in the report as a short-term solution in lieu of a planned “diverging diamond” interchange there.

The design, preferred by the Virginia Department of Transportation, reduces signalization frequency by routing traffic temporarily to opposite sides of the road. The $17 million project, which recently secured VDOT funding, is scheduled for design by the end of 2023 and construction in 2028, county planning staff said.

Driveways for nearby Luck Stone facilities would also be relocated as part of the project.

Several residents of the nearby Parkside Village subdivision, an age-restricted community about a mile from the project site, said in a public hearing that the fulfillment center would contribute to traffic and road quality woes.

“There is no doubt that residents of Parkside Village, a 55-and-up community, will experience gridlock,” resident Margaret Levet told the commission. She also questioned why Panattoni is applying for the approvals under an LLC called PDC TN/FL LPIV.

“Why the code talk?” Levet asked. “Who exactly is seeking to erect a fulfillment center on this parcel? The lack of transparency inspires skepticism and leads me to believe that the applicant and county and state government understand that many of us who will be impacted by this proposal will not see this as a positive.”

Condlin noted the “PDC” in the LLC’s name are initials for Panattoni Development Co. Jo Ann Hunter, Goochland’s deputy county administrator for community and economic development, also mentioned the sensitivities involved in such projects when a commissioner inquired about the LLC name.

“This is an economic development project, so the applicant does not want to share their name at this time,” Hunter said, adding that it has similar facilities elsewhere in Virginia and in Delaware and Nashville, Tennessee.

Hunter also noted the site is within an area of the county identified as its industrial corridor. In addition to the quarries, surrounding properties include the Rockville Commerce Industrial Park, home to Midnight Brewery and other businesses.

The project site consists of four parcels owned by successor trustees for Nancy Bailey and James Nuckols Jr. The county has assessed the parcels at $6 million collectively.

It’s unclear whether Panattoni has the property under contract. Reached Monday, Condlin said he could not comment on the project.

Panattoni is working with engineering firms Bowman, which drew up the conceptual plan; Kimley-Horn, which produced a transportation analysis; and Ceso, which handled the landscaping plan.

The Planning Commission voted to recommend approval of the rezoning and permit requests, which now go to the Board of Supervisors. The board is scheduled to make a final decision at its Aug. 2 meeting.

Montgomery County Public Schools

Two school districts that often go head to head in the DC Suburbs are Montgomery County in Maryland and Fairfax County in Virginia. There are decades of history where these districts were home to some of the top high schools in the country. Covid changed that for many schools and locally – we were not unaffected. Let’s see where these two highly regarded school districts currently fare in the education department. This is going to be a deeper dive into what Montgomery County Schools offer – both the good and not so good.

Montgomery County School System

There are a lot of educational choices in Montgomery County. When I went to school we matriculated through the in-boundary elementary, middle and high school. Other than a few elective choices, there weren’t other schools you could choose from, nor was there a way to tailor your education to a specific career path. Sure, a few guys took auto-body shop class, but there were no pathways paved toward college.

This is not the case in Montgomery County Maryland.

Montgomery County’s 211 schools offer both local “by-right” schools as well as regional and countywide programs. There are language immersion programs for French, Spanish and Chinese. There are Centers for Enriched Studies which is like Talented and Gifted for 4th and 5th grade. There are magnet middle schools which offer digital design, performing arts and aerospace technology. At the high school level, the choices blow wide open.

In 8th grade, students can apply to one of the many programs available at county high schools. Some of these programs are criteria-based and selective, and some are administered by a lottery. Some programs are open to the whole county, some are just the geographic region around the high school. Applications open in early October with a deadline in early November.

The first step is to go to the website where you can see the program offerings: https://www2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/curriculum/specialprograms/high/

We will start with likely the most well-known of the programs, the IB or International Baccalaureate Program. The IB program at Richard Montgomery HS is a countywide, criteria- based (magnet) program. There are IB programs at Kennedy, Springbrook and Watkins Mill High Schools which are regional, criteria-based (magnet) programs. IB programs are also offered at Bethesda-Chevy Chase, Einstein, Seneca Valley and Rockville High Schools.

Rockville High School offers IB / International Baccalaureate career related programs in engineering, biomedical, computer science, hospitality management and child development. This is open to students in about a dozen surrounding high schools.

Blair and Poolesville High Schools are Science, Math and Computer Science Magnet schools.

Clarksburg High School has an I.T. / Tech program where students can earn certifications and college credit. This is open to several surrounding schools near Clarksburg.

Wheaton High School also offers engineering and biomedical programs open to those in the Down County Consortium* as well as college and career programs in construction, healthcare, hospitality and I.T. open to a group of southern Montgomery County High Schools. The same programs are also available at Seneca Valley for the northern part of Montgomery County.

The Down County Consortium comprises 5 high schools (Blair, Einstein, Kennedy, Northwood and Wheaton) which offer different academic focuses. Students in these high school pyramids, meaning, the feeder schools that go to these high schools, participate in a lottery called the High School Choice Process. You’re always guaranteed a spot in your base / in-boundary school, but you have a preference to attend one of the other schools based on where an older sibling is attending, socioeconomic status, school capacity, etc.

Kennedy High School has the Leadership Training Institute open for those in the DCC. Einstein High School has a Visual Arts Program. Blair, as mentioned earlier, is a Science, Math and Computer Science Magnet School.

The DCC or Down County Consortium was created in the Silver Spring area of the county which is highly dense with fluid boundaries that, in the future, may be continually readjusted.

Similarly, there is a Northeast Consortium for Blake, Paint Branch and Springbrook High Schools. Springbrook as said earlier, has the IB Program as well as Engineering and I.T. Academies. Paint Branch has Science and Media Academies and Blake has Arts, Communication, Humanities and Public Service focuses.

Whitman High School is one of the most popular high schools in the county and they have a Leadership Academy for Social Justice. This is open to the whole county, but transportation options are currently limited. Montgomery County promises they are working on it.

Magruder High School has Aviation and Aerospace Engineering programs open to the entire county.

There are other high schools too which are highly rated and offer AP, dual enrollment and a variety of academic focus area programs as well. They aren’t always open to the whole county so if you want a school like Walter Johnson or Winston Churchill then you would need to live in the boundary for those schools.

North in the county, it’s not as population dense and the high schools are more spread out.

The graduation rate for Montgomery County Maryland’s Public Schools is almost 92%.

Montgomery County, MD Schools – Academics

After the infamous 2018 Johns Hopkins audit, there have been a lot of unhappy parents. Summing it up, Hopkins found that English and Math curricula were unsatisfactory. Fewer than 1/3 of the students understood math for their grade level and fewer than 1/4th understood English Language Arts.

Teachers said it contained too much busywork, too much screen time, not enough time to practice skills and did nothing to help those in special education. The teachers tried to supplement Common Core with other material. Parents lost a lot of trust in Montgomery County Public Schools.

Montgomery County re-bid the curriculum and in 2019, 2.0 was replaced. The new math curricula have turned out better than the ELA.

It feels very a la carte style. It makes use of online apps / technology, plus workbooks. But then there was Covid, and the timing could not have been worse to train teachers on new systems and a new curriculum.

Direct from a teacher, “Kids are subjected to endless testing ($$$) and we are required to collect and document hundreds of data points – for what purpose? We are unable to use that information to modify the curriculum. Data should be used to drive further instruction, and as teachers, our hands are tied.”

This is not great news, but it’s also not unique to Montgomery County. The same is happening in many other districts in the country.

Montgomery County School Administration

Current Superintendent Monifa McKnight started as an interim Superintendent in June 2021 and was appointed for a 4 year term in Feb, 2022. When she started, she had a lot to address. Her letter to the school community stated, “One of my top three priorities is rebuilding community trust in MCPS… I am committed to transparency and responsiveness as we work to address our challenges and celebrate our many strengths.”

We are only a few months into the 2023 school year and already there have been several personnel changes. The deputy superintendent was no longer employed by MCPS, and three administrative personnel at the main office were placed on leave.

One of her first orders of business was to survey the parent community. They put out this handy graphic of what the school system is doing right and what needs to change. The left side is what is going right. The middle is where change is needed. The column on the right is what parents believe is the one thing that needs to be addressed to make the biggest change.

School Safety, Communication, Transparency, Increase Teacher Autonomy, Improve Special Education Services, Hire More Teachers, Reduce Class Sizes – these are currently the major issues facing Montgomery County Public Schools.

Montgomery County Today – a Snapshot in Time

In the last couple months alone, the following issues have occurred or come to light.

Montgomery County Schools – Conclusion

Montgomery County Schools has some of the best high schools in the region. According to Niche.com, Poolesville is ranked #2 in the area, Whitman is #3 and Churchill is #4. They round out the top 10 as well with Wootton at #6, Walter Johnson at #7, Richard Montgomery at #8 and Bethesda Chevy-Chase (BCC) at #9. The fact that there is almost no Fairfax County presence in the top 10 and I have long felt Niche.com is not the place to go for information.

On U.S. News’s rankings, Poolesville, Whitman, Wootton, Churchill, Walter Johnson, BCC, Richard Montgomery, Northwest, Blair and Blake are the top 10 for Montgomery County.

There are always going to be problems at schools, especially in light of a pandemic and shifting approaches to education and behavior issues but Montgomery County schools stand the test of time. This is a highly educated area where parents push their kids to aim high and achieve. It’s also an area where a lot of parents can afford private schools but opt for public schools because of their stellar reputation.