MONONGALIA COUNTY SCHOOLS ADMINISTRATION: BEYOND THE PALE
According to the most recent site plan, below, for Eastwood Elementary, parents and children from Woodburn, Jerome Park, Woodland Terrace, and elsewhere will be forced to use WV 705 to enter and exit the new school. Nothing could be more unsafe, inconvenient, impractical or at times impossible.
Others are also endangered and disregarded, including parents and children who need to pick up and be picked up after school and drive downtown using US 119 (Mileground Road), and parents and children who might need to travel from Eastwood to Mountaineer Middle just off US 119 toward downtown.
That means taking up to an extra 5 or 6 mile roundabout loop through some of the most congested and hazardous parts of greater Morgantown to get where you need to go, to get home or downtown from Eastwood, or it means risking getting T-boned by traffic in crossing arterial highway 705 to make the immediate left turn from Eastwood necessary for the much shorter route. That left turn is often so hazardous or logistically difficult-to-impossible that WVDOT may not even allow it.
So where then is the sensible and absolutely necessary second access and egress for the new school? Where is the design, the plan, any details? Nowhere to be found. And nowhere on the most recent Eastwood site plan below. Why?
Is the Mon Schools administration stupid to the point of insanity? Or negligent to the point of criminality? Those seem to be the only two possible explanations. Is Mon Schools purposefully trying to punish and abuse the parents and children who currently attend Woodburn Elementary? Or is this more of a bit of accidental administrative negligence and incompetence?
Obviously an access/egress, or at least a right turn egress, should be built from the parking lot area of Eastwood to Tramore Lane (and thus to the Mileground Road/US 119). This is the only way to provide many students and their parents a much shorter and somewhat less hazardous route back to their homes or to downtown Morgantown.
Amazingly, this access and egress ALREADY EXISTS BUT MON SCHOOLS CURRENTLY PLANS TO GET RID OF IT, PER BELOW.
That’s right. The mobile home parcel being purchased by Mon Schools is served by Tramore Lane but Mon Schools’ most recent and longstanding design and plans disallow such access:
Above: Eastwood Site Plan, posted at BOE Eastwood website, summer, 2011
The Mon Schools design above even erases the road (Tramore Lane) that currently exists leading to and from the schoolgrounds and that will exist whether or not the school makes use of it. We restore the road and access points below, which currently enter and exit the area that would contain the school parking lot: Read the rest of this entry »
New Woodburn Community School 
