Best Elementary Schools in Sandy Spring, MD

There is one elementary school, Sherwood Elementary, serving grades PK through 5 in Sandy Spring, Maryland, a community within the highly-rated Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) district.

Sherwood Elementary is a standout school that significantly outperforms both its district and the state of Maryland in nearly every academic category. For the 2025-2026 school year, the school achieved a 52% proficiency rate in mathematics, far exceeding the state average of 27.1%, and a 66.7% proficiency rate in English Language Arts, compared to the state's 51.7%. The school has shown a strong upward trend in its state ranking, moving from the 71st percentile to the 78th percentile in the most recent year. With a low student-teacher ratio of 12.1, the school provides a personalized learning environment, and its per-student spending of $21,435 reflects a high-resource setting that yields strong academic returns.

A key finding is a notable dip in math performance as students progress through the grades. While 3rd graders achieve an excellent 70.6% proficiency in math, this drops to 48.6% in 4th grade and falls below the district average to 32.4% in 5th grade. This suggests the school excels at building early foundational skills but may need targeted interventions to sustain that success in upper elementary grades. In contrast, English Language Arts performance remains consistently strong across all grade levels. The school also has a relatively low free/reduced lunch rate of 25.7% and a chronic absenteeism rate of 21.2%, which is slightly below the district average.