School officials announced their plans earlier this month to add seventh-grade classes by the 2008-09 school year and eighth grade by 2009-10.

Carol Franek, head of the school, told the local community newspaper that it was time to expand, as the demand has increased for the additional classes.

"When we go to an eighth grade, then we open up many more options for the students," Franek said.

Currently, the school runs from nursery to sixth grade, after which parents of Grace Episcopal students typically choose a middle school for two years before shifting again to a high school, or enroll their children in a private school.

The school will be renovated starting next summer by converting offices into classrooms. Four more classrooms would hold, at most, 18 students each.

"Actually, they're being converted back," Franek said. "They were converted from classrooms to offices [in 1968]."

The newspaper reported that parents are thrilled that Grace Episcopal is expanding to a full middle school, and many plan to keep their rising sixth-grade students there through the eighth grade.

"I have become a strong supporter of the [kindergarten] through eighth grade model," said Valerie Wooldridge, parent of a fifth-grader. "In that kind of a model, it's such a better place for the kids to be rather than be in a new environ in such a difficult time in their life."

Grace Episcopal, founded by Grace Episcopal Church in Silver Spring, Maryland, began as a nursery program in 1960, and added first through sixth grades in 1968 at the former Larchmont Public School in Kensington, Franek said.

The nursery program and kindergarten classes are still held in Silver Spring.

According to Franek and the school's website, more than one-third of the 250 students at Grace are not Caucasian or are foreign nationals, and approximately two-thirds of the families practice faiths other than Episcopalian.

"One of the key cultural things that Grace has it that it's very unpretentious, very low key," another parent told the newspaper. "It's great they have small classes and the most diversity of students of anywhere in [Montgomery] county."