Staff Writer

Montgomery County Public Schools made a decision Tuesday that left a lot of people happy.

By paying for Montgomery Blair High School to hold its graduation at the Comcast Center in College Park, Superintendent Jerry Weast pleased Jewish and civil rights groups, upset that the county board of education was permitting Blair to hold its commencement ceremony in a church, as well as Blair families who wanted a venue large enough to accommodate guests of the Silver Spring school's more than 750 graduates.

Weast's announcement Tuesday comes after the county board of education voted 5-3 on Thursday of last week to permit Blair to use the Jericho City of Praise Church in Landover for graduation, overruling the superintendent's 2005 decision to ban religious institutions as graduation sites, a stand he reaffirmed early last month.

Blair families had argued that the school needed to use the church because two options the county provided ‹ the 4,000-seat DAR Constitution Hall in the District and the 5,000-seat Showplace Arena and Prince George's Equestrian Center in Upper Marlboro ‹ were not large enough and presented other problems, such as poor access for the disabled at the former and a lack of public transportation for the latter.

But last week's board vote had led to criticism of the school system, and even hints of legal action from some civil rights groups, for allowing a graduation to be held in a building with "Jesus is the Lord!!!" written in large script letters on the building's exterior and containing a sanctuary that included the same words at the back of the stage.

In a memo to board of education members on Tuesday afternoon, Weast said he took the decision "to avoid the potential for costly litigation."

He said the county not only will pay to hold the Blair graduation at the 17,950-seat University of Maryland facility, but also will fund Sherwood High School's commencement at Comcast. That school, which also found the two original county options inadequate, had been raising money from parents to offset the $37,000 fee that the College Park facility was charging. Weast said the cost to hold both graduations at Comcast is still being negotiated, but it is expected to total $50,000 to $65,000 for both ceremonies.

Weast also said that "as a matter of fairness," MCPS will cover the rental costs for all the other high schools graduations in the county, which range from $5,000 to $6,000 each. The $125,000 necessary has been "identified" in the fiscal year 2007 budget, wrote Weast, and he is preparing an amendment to next year's budget to include the Comcast Center as a venue option for a "limited number of high schools."

The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, which had urged the board in a letter last week to not allow the use of Jericho, was happy with the decision.

"We are extremely pleased with the compromise that Jerry Weast and the school board reached," said JCRC executive director Ron Halber. "It satisfies everyone ‹ the ceremony is now held in a secular environment" and the church is "not in the position of covering up its [religious] icons," which it did not want to do.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which had suggested legal action was a possibility in a letter to the board last week, also praised the county.

"The board has done the right thing by providing Montgomery Blair High with the means to find a suitable site for its graduation," Americans United executive director Barry Lynn said in a statement. "A house of worship is not the proper forum for a public school graduation ceremony, where all students and parents should feel comfortable and welcome."

The American Civil Liberties Union, which was also contemplating a response, now "can turn our attention to other things," said Arthur Spitzer, legal director of the ACLU National Capital Area.

Meanwhile, Miriam Szapiro, who was the Blair Parent Teacher Student Association's representative handling graduation site issues, said the resolution was a "wonderful decision," pointing out that the school had always wanted the county simply to provide and pay for a "proper place" that could accommodate its large senior class. (Jericho had offered its facility for free.)

Parents at other schools besides Blair also hailed Weast's memo. Mary Nowotny, head of Sherwood's committee for graduation venue choice, said the community was "ecstatic" that the county would be paying for the use of Comcast, and she said the $20,000 the school already raised would be either given back to donors or put toward other school uses.

Nowotny said she was also glad to see that MCPS leadership "finally realized" that having enough seats in a graduation venue to fit everyone's relatives "really is a concern for families."

Dan Prywes of Rockville, a Richard Montgomery High School parent who was not pleased by the religious nature of the church when he attended the Rockville school's graduation held at Jericho in 2005, said he was "glad that the superintendent wisely decided that a few dollars are worth avoiding a divisive issue."

He had been concerned that after the board decision last week, RMHS would move to Jericho in the future.

Board member Stephen Abrams (District 2) said he is glad that the superintendent had recognized the problems and taken the responsibility "to come up with a [graduation] venue [which accommodated] the size of our schools."