New Woodburn Community School

AND THEY WONDER WHY ANYONE OBJECTS

Now, if you had told a sane person that the new WV School Building Authority funded “green” school in Morgantown would be built on a sewage dump, at a highly congested intersection of heavily traveled roads, where no one or nearly no one could walk or safely bike to, and if you would have told a sane person that the WV SBA and Mon Schools would spend between $21 million and $25 million to build this Pre-K thru 5th grade school for 545 students, then that sane person would have been reasonably expected to laugh, curse, or vow to file any number of lawsuits to stop such insanity, such gross negligence of young children, such a stupid and radical disservice to the taxpaying public of West Virginia and Monongalia County.

Such is the case of the intended Eastwood Elementary to be located at the dangerous, jammed, and unhealthy intersection of two principal arterial highways WV 705 and US 119, on the “Mileground” that in name and actuality sounds like a racetrack, and when not jammed too often is.

Two words for this siting: stupid…negligent.

The civil liability risk for this site is potentially immense. The first school bus that gets sideswiped and sends children to the hospital in the roundabout projected to border the schoolgrounds, in 2015 when both highways are expanded and the intersection is moved to the end of the short school drive, should be the subject of lawsuits. Any rash of asthma outbreaks, or heaven forbid, childhood leukemia, or potentially fatal pneumonia, or any other heart and lung and blood related disease like bronchitis, wheezing, cancer, or heart problems, due to the elevated pollution levels created by the scientifically known vehicle exhaust zone of the high traffic roads that frame the site, should be the subject of lawsuits.

Any bacteria-related diseases due to students spending time at the bio-pond, or the proposed orchard, and the proposed nature trail, not only air-flooded by vehicle exhaust but situated at or below the levels of the mines and the ravine-side mine portals and the old septic sites and sewage drainage fields, and the mines underlying the entire school that are flooded with sewage from the longtime adjacent trailer park that to the best of anyone’s knowledge continues to directly release its sewage into the mines a few dozen feet below the school grounds, and above the north-facing slope of the schoolgrounds, should be the subject of extensive lawsuits.

Why? Because there are state statutes and state laws and WV Constitutional protections that prohibit schools from being built on sites that threaten, let alone damage, the health and safety and well-being of children. And there are legally binding state policies that for obvious safety reasons explicitly prohibit school sites from being located at arterial highways, and heavily traveled roads, and congested roads, and site where such factors could contribute to even the possibility of entrapment, let alone the reality of a kind of daily entrapment due to rush hour congestion and high traffic. These AT SITE highway safety violations will be further compounded when 705 is expanded to 4 lanes within the next several years, which will eliminate the safety lane outside the white lines that currently runs along the ravine and valley edge.

The site is essentially entrapped and will continue to be. The site is dangerously situated and will be ever more so. The site is traffic-noise and vehicle-exhaust polluted and will ever increasingly be. The site is subject to tens upon tens of thousands of vehicles per day and will ever increasingly be.

This wantonly negligent site is highly unstable, not only physically due to the mine voids the run a few dozen feet under the entire site but also developmentally unstable. Sheetz gas station, typically a huge operation, has expressed strong interest in siting a gas station at the intersection by the school. Plenty of land will be available for purchase very near the intersection over the next few years, immediately bordering the school.

Traffic is expected to increase by about 50 percent or more over the first two decades of the school.

School intersection expansion and other immediately adjacent highway expansions, over and above the coming intersection shift and the doubling of lanes of Wv 705 and US 119, are likely, including an extension of WV 705 through the intersection with US 119 as a 3 lane .7 of a mile cut to route 857. This could add additional tens of thousand of vehicles, including diesel truck traffic to the school site and intersection.

Similarly the long desired expressway from the center of the university and downtown up Falling Run to within a quarter mile or an eighth of a mile or less of the school could bring an additional tens of thousands of vehicles per day onto the arterial highways framing the school grounds.

And the school grounds literally contain a vast sewage dump in the mine voids a few dozen feet below the surface of the land (and above the schoolgrounds’ back slope), an unstable lay of land that studies of the past year note is ripe for potentially catastrophic subsidence, ground collapse, thus the expensive mine mitigation plans, which may or may not work.

The state and local educational agencies have suffered a catastrophic collapse of brain and heart cells in pushing to site a facility for small children at this grossly negligent site, highly unstable, health damaging and safety endangering, in clearcut violation of binding state statutes, laws, and constitutional provisions.

Even more impressive is the availability of healthy, safe, and otherwise high quality school sites that Mon Schools already owns: the existing Woodburn schoolgrounds for Woodburn Elementary and the 94 acre UHS campus for Easton Elementary. The UHS sprawling campus is on the border of Easton and North elementaries’ catchments, where in a fact of high comedy, the most recent Mon Schools districting maps already (mistakenly) show Easton Elementary to be located, near or at the UHS campus, rather than at the base of Easton Hill. The spacious UHS campus is a highly logical and very functional place for Easton Elementary. Likewise, the Woodburn schoolgrounds are the hands-down logical and functional place for Woodburn Elementary. So it is that not only is the consolidated Eastwood Elementary intersection location stupendously horrid and wrong and incredibly expensive, increasingly damaging and risky, the two alternative locations for a couple of modest-sized elementary schools are especially beneficial, appropriate, highly affordable, healthy and safe.

What choice did Mon Schools make to situate and educate young children? We all know. Mon Schools chose the sewage dump.

And they wonder why anyone objects. LOL

Laughing Out Loud.

Suing in court.