MoCo Headlines: Bag Tax Starts, New Schools Open

With more than a dozen websites covering Montgomery County, Patch brings you news from every corner of our community. Catch up on headlines you might have missed this week, including the start of the Montgomery County bag tax and the opening of two modernized schools.

Gaithersburg is narrowing down its search for a new director of Planning and Code Administration with the help of a Georgia-based consultant. The city is spending at least $13,000 looking for the right candidate. Staff hopes to make an offer in the next three months. Since September, the city has divided up the work among several other high-level staffers.

Volunteers handed out reusable bags in the Wheaton Triangle on Tuesday to help shoppers transition to the Montgomery County nickel bag tax, which began Jan. 1. How are you adjusting to the bag tax?

In response to Johns Hopkins University's move to dismiss a lawsuit from the heirs of Belward Farm in Gaithersburg, Montgomery County Court has set a date to hear both sides on Feb. 1. The heirs of the 107-acre site at Darnestown and Muddy Branch roads are hoping to block Hopkins from building a 4.7 million square-foot biotech campus—a linchpin to the broader vision for an 800-acre "Science City" between Gaithersburg and Rockville—because they don’t believe the plan aligns with the university’s original 1989 agreement.

A judge sentenced a Rockville man on Thursday to 20 years in prison for driving the car involved in a crash in Olney that killed a Col. Zadok Magruder High School senior and two graduates in May. Read more on Rockville Patch.

The Montgomery Village Community Band—whose 70 volunteer musicians hail from all over Montgomery County—has lost its leading light. Gordon W. Bowie, the band's director for the past dozen years, died Thursday morning after a long battle against cancer.

Takoma Park's deputy director of recreation will be moving up to head the department and fill the spot former Director Debra Haiduven left in August 2011, according to a city news release. Gregory Clark was hired as deputy director of the department in February 2007. During his tenure as deputy Clark oversaw several functional areas of the department, including the operation of the New Hampshire Avenue Recreation Center, teen programming, before and after school care, and summer camps.

The ethics panel of the county school board met in a closed-door session recently to determine the fate of a special kids' exercise program at Somerset Elementary School, in Chevy Chase. The program has been led by the school's physical education teachers for the past three decades, and while there is a fee for student participation in the before- and after-school activities, no child has ever been turned away because of his or her family's inability to pay the fee. The MCPS ethics panel ruled that this activity constituted a teacher accepting money for special tutoring of his or her own students, which MCPS teachers are not allowed to do.

After 18 months in a holding school, the students of Garrett Park Elementary School got to try out their modernized facility this week, replete with interactive white boards, eco-friendly features and, for the first time, a gymnasium. .

Cannon Road Elementary was one of three county schools to debut new buildings this week. The school's old building was torn down in late 2010 and replaced with an $18.5 million, 83,277-square-foot facility.