Potomac is served by Montgomery County Public Schools, and no single set of schools serves all of it. The community is split across five high school attendance areas, and the lines follow neither the 20854 ZIP nor the census place boundary. This page names the schools serving Potomac addresses as of August 2026 and says where the lines run. Boundaries change, and two studies are changing them now, so the district's locator is the only current authority.
Attendance boundaries change. The district's own locator is the authority — not a listing, and not this page.
MCPS School Assignment Tool →Most of Potomac sits in the Winston Churchill cluster. Potomac, Beverly Farms and Wayside elementary schools articulate to Herbert Hoover Middle School; Bells Mill and Seven Locks elementary schools articulate to Cabin John Middle School; both middle schools feed Winston Churchill High School. Cabin John is shared between two clusters, so its eighth graders do not all go to the same place: Cold Spring and Stone Mill elementary schools also articulate to Cabin John and then to Thomas S. Wootton High School. Away from that core the chain changes. In the northwest, above Travilah Road, Travilah Elementary articulates to Robert Frost Middle School and Wootton. Along the southern edge, Carderock Springs Elementary articulates to Thomas W. Pyle Middle School and Walt Whitman High School. Where the 20854 ZIP runs northeast toward Rockville, Ritchie Park Elementary articulates to Julius West Middle and Richard Montgomery High, and a few eastern-edge addresses fall to Walter Johnson High. Every school named serves the standard grade spans, K-5, 6-8 and 9-12; nothing here is paired or split-grade.
River Road, Maryland 190, carries most of the Churchill and Whitman line through Potomac. From roughly Seven Locks Road west to Persimmon Tree Road, addresses north of River Road fall to Churchill and Seven Locks Elementary; addresses south of it fall to Whitman and Carderock Springs Elementary. West of Persimmon Tree the line leaves River Road, turning south along Persimmon Tree and picking up again near Brickyard Road, so the southern edge is not one clean cut. Travilah Road carries the Churchill and Wootton line across the northwest, Churchill to the south and Wootton to the north, with shorter stretches along Glen Road and Piney Meetinghouse Road. At the eastern edge, near the I-270 spur, the line follows Democracy Boulevard, Bells Mill Road and Tuckerman Lane. These corridors were checked against Montgomery County's published MCPS school area layer for 2026-2027. They describe the general run of the line, not the parcel-level edge, and a house fronting a boundary road can sit on either side.
MCPS assigns by address of residence. It groups schools into clusters, a high school with its feeder middle and elementary schools, and the chain between levels is called articulation. Two things complicate that. Cabin John Middle School has split articulation, so knowing the middle school does not tell you the high school. And elementary, middle and high boundaries are three separate maps that need not agree at their edges. Two programmes change the default. Potomac Elementary has run a partial Chinese immersion programme since 1996, half the day in each language; students inside its boundary are offered seats first and the rest go to out-of-area students by lottery, the 2026-2027 window running February 2 to April 10, 2026. Separately, the Change of School Assignment process lets a family request a transfer out of the assigned school; the 2026-2027 window closed April 7, 2026, and a granted request makes transportation the family's responsibility. Neither changes what an address is assigned to.
MCPS runs a School Assignment Tool. Enter a street address and it returns the assigned elementary, middle and high school. Use it rather than any third-party map, this page included. The district's own disclaimer is worth reading: the tool combines data from county GIS, M-NCPPC and MCPS, the data sets may contain errors, and the user assumes liability for what it generates. Results are least reliable for new subdivisions and for addresses near a service area boundary, which in Potomac means anything along River Road, Persimmon Tree Road, Brickyard Road, Travilah Road or Glen Road. For those, call the MCPS boundary line at 240-740-7725 or write to BoundaryInquiries@mcpsmd.org and get the answer in writing with a date on it. MCPS also publishes per-school service area map PDFs, but the set posted in August 2026 is labelled 2023-2024, so treat those as reference only.
On March 26, 2026 the Board of Education approved a package that reaches Potomac: it relocates Thomas S. Wootton High School to the Crown Farm site in Gaithersburg and organises the district into six regions for secondary programmes, admitted by lottery or application. Crown opens in August 2027; boundaries phase in with grades 9 and 10 in 2027-2028 and reach full implementation in 2029-2030. In the plan MCPS mapped, Cold Spring Elementary moves from Cabin John Middle and Wootton to Herbert Hoover Middle and Churchill; Travilah Elementary moves from Robert Frost Middle to Cabin John Middle; Potomac Elementary's middle school changes from Hoover to Cabin John while its high school stays Churchill; Bells Mill, Seven Locks, Beverly Farms and Wayside keep both assignments. The decision is contested. An appeal to the Maryland State Board of Education was referred to an administrative law judge in July 2026, and the adopted plan stood as of August 2026. On the same March date the Board approved a countywide elementary and middle school boundary study, now in its first phase, with a closure and consolidation decision expected in May 2027 and changes taking effect from 2029-2030.
Check the address, not the neighbourhood. Potomac subdivisions are not units of school assignment; neighbours on one street can differ. A listing's school field is entered by the listing agent and verified by neither the MLS nor MCPS, so treat it as a claim to be checked. Run the address through the locator yourself, save the dated result, and if the assignment matters, confirm it in writing with MCPS before you write the offer. If a first day of school would fall in September 2027 or later, ask what the approved plan does to that address; the answer for a first grader and for a rising junior are not the same. One thing this page deliberately does not do is rate, rank, score or compare any school. School ratings track neighbourhood demographics closely, and steering buyers by school quality is among the most documented fair housing violations there is. This is a brokerage licensed in Virginia, Maryland and the District, and that line is firm. Which school serves an address is a fact, and pinning it down is part of the job. What you make of the school is yours.
More on the area in the Potomac guide.
School assignment turns on the address, not the neighbourhood, and a listing's school field is unverified. Artur can confirm it against the district record before you write.
