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When students left Ashburton Elementary School in Bethesda in June, six portable classrooms dotted the school's campus, a constant reminder of overcrowding and a need for modernization.

When students returned to class Tuesday, they saw a brand-new scene.

Construction on the $7 million addition began in August 2007, and teachers and administrators are glad the end has come.

"We're just so excited," Principal Charlene Eroh said. "This will really help maximize instructional time, because the students won't have to be walking all over the school."

Off Lone Oak Drive, the school now has 10 new classrooms, a new art room, and four new playgrounds.

In previous years, the fourth and fifth grades were taught in trailers outside the school to accommodate the growing population. The school, built in 1947 and modernized in 1993, could accommodate 450 students. Current projections set the capacity now at 660 students.

Eroh said 600 students were slated to begin school at Ashburton on Tuesday.

For teachers in the new wing, which connects two portions of the old building, the change was a long time coming.

Lisa Neumann has taught at Ashburton for seven years; the last six have been in a portable.

"The first thing I noticed was how bright the new rooms are," the fifth-grade teacher said while appreciating the gleaming white tile in her classroom. "The kids will enjoy it, and it will be a more welcoming environment than the portables."

In addition to the new rooms, the school also installed Promethean boards in each of the school's 31 classrooms.

The high-tech boards are about the size of a normal classroom blackboard, and school work and Web sites can be projected onto them. Teachers can also write on the Promethean from around the room using an interactive tablet, and students use buzzers to answer questions posed by teachers on the board.

Marney Jacobs, an administrative secretary at the school and the school's former PTA president, has worked at Ashburton for the past 11 years.

"The school had a different reputation when my children started here," she said. "But now it's a place where people are excited to come to."

Jacobs said in the past the school has had problems controlling the temperature and the humidity. The new addition, and renovation of some classrooms, has put an end to that.

Eight schools in Bethesda, Potomac and North Potomac were slated for "major construction" over the summer, according to county schools records. Twenty-seven "major construction" projects took place in Montgomery County this summer.

Of these projects, 14 were slated for completion by the start of school Tuesday, Montgomery County Public Schools spokeswomen Kate Harrison said.