New Woodburn Community School

DEATH ZONE SCHOOL SITE

The horrific calamity of last week’s April 20th traffic fatality and multiple injuries and hospitalizations at the intersection of Route 705 and Stewartstown Road show why siting schools at high traffic, congested, and/or arterial highways is prohibited in West Virginia, and why the Eastwood Mileground intersection site, just up the road at another dangerous intersection, is such a menacing and flagrant violation.

Superintendent Devono’s repugnant primary plan, described recently on WAJR, is to send your children through that fatal intersection every day, even though your children don’t live anywhere near that intersection or any part of Route 705.

The Dominion Post reports:

“Monongalia County Sheriff Al Kisner has firsthand experience…. He said he was once hit from behind while at 705 and Stewartstown road. He was waiting for the traffic light to change. When it did, the car behind him hit his vehicle before he started moving.

Mon Schools in complete negligence is going full throttle in siting a school on the most dangerous highway in the entire region, even though not a single student in the Eastwood catchment lives on or near that highway, that deathway, Route 705.

“433 wrecks, 30 weeks, 8 sites” – first 30 weeks of 2010:

Except for the very few children who live on or just off the Mileground, not a single child who attends Easton or Woodburn Elementary would have to ever risk the traffic dangers and pollution damages of either the Mileground road or Route 705 if not for the horrible arterial intersection Eastwood school site.

But because Mon Schools in all its flagrant disregard for the health and safety and well-being of the schoolchildren of Easton and Woodburn is trying to site the combined Eastwood school at the intersection of Route 705 and the Mileground (US 119), several hundred young children, ages 3 to 11, will be exposed to the dangers and damages of those highways, their intersection, and the air-polluted school site every single school day, at least twice per day…4 times per day if they go out and come back for a field trip…6 times per day if they return after school for a play, a practice, a meeting, or other event. That’s about a quarter million exposures per school year, of young children to terrible Mon-Schools-imposed dangers and damages.

A school sited on the existing Woodburn schoolgrounds would never expose the schoolchildren to Route 705 or to the 705/Mileground intersection. Never. Not even for students attending from the direction of Easton.

And if a second school were built for the students of Easton, perhaps on land the school district already owns at the UHS site or elsewhere in the Easton catchment, then a couple more congested intersections would be removed from many young children’s daily lives.

But Mon Schools by pushing relentlessly for the Eastwood Mileground site has shown itself to be entirely determined to, at best, risk your children’s lives in that zone of death on those deadly roads, at those deadly intersections. And Mon Schools is doing so at appalling expense, paying top commercial rates for the substandard sewage dump that is the undermined Mileground menace of a site.