New Woodburn Community School

YOU DON’T BUILD SCHOOLS FOR SMALL CHILDREN AT HIGH TRAFFIC INTERSECTIONS

You don’t do it, if you have a lick of common sense. Evidently, Mon Schools does not.

You don’t do it, if you have any idea what comprises a quality educational location: a safe place, a quiet place, a clean place, an ecologically inviting place. The Mileground intersection is none of these.

You don’t do it it, if the location violates basic and vital state student safety mandates. The Eastwood intersection site violates multiple provisions of crucial state mandates.

You don’t build a school for small children adjacent to multiple four and five lane arterial highways, if you are little more than brain dead, or heart dead, or even respectful of crucial state safety mandates. The Mon Schools administration and school board: pathetic and worse.

The pre-k and kindergarten wing of Eastwood Elementary would be about twice as close to the WV 705/Mileground intersection as North Elementary is from WV 705, that same super busy four lane highway that a pre-k student from North ran into, all alone, this past week, as widely reported, after running away from North Elementary completely undetected.

In other words, the predictable coming highway calamity at Eastwood Elementary very nearly happened far ahead of schedule of Eastwood’s completion of construction. The North Elementary building is located near this same hazardous highway that the Eastwood site borders but the North building is twice the distance away from the highway as would be the Eastwood building.

The Eastwood grounds immediately border WV 705 and its intersection with US 119 (Mileground Road), and the Eastwood building is being built to sit about twice as close to not one but two arterial highways as the North Elementary building. And Eastwood is not elevated up away from the highway as is North but instead sits at the level of the arterial intersection banned by state mandate from being located near, let alone, at new school sites in West Virginia.

North Elementary was built before the new school siting student safety mandate existed. But there is no excuse for the fundamental violation of a student’s right to life and safety that is the insanity and transgression of Eastwood Elementary on the Mileground.

North was built in a precarious location. Eastwood is on schedule to be built at a far more precarious location, which happens to violate multiple student safety provisions of state mandates.

No wonder the Morgantown newspaper, the Dominion Post, editorialized so strongly against Mon Schools for failing to prevent a pre-k student from running into the city’s most dangerous highway: after all, a couple years ago the Dominion Post editorialized in favor of Mon Schools’ decision to build Eastwood at the intersection of that same arterial highway and the other notorious highway (the Mileground), at half the distance as North Elementary!

How does the Dominion Post’s support for the entire school site of Eastwood, to be located and built in violation of fundamental state student safety mandates, look now?

Like insanity. How dare Mon Schools have unsafe doors! opined the Dominion Post. Meanwhile, the whole Eastwood Mileground site is a hazardous, stark violation of state student safety mandates. It’s nuts to editorialize against the one and not the other.

Mon Schools needs to get its doors fixed at once, obviously. And then the next day, Mon Schools needs to fix its new school site on the Mileground by abandoning it entirely.

Pigs will fly, or the West Virginia Supreme Court will intervene. Either way, you don’t build a school for small children at high traffic intersections. If you do, what you are left with is the insanity of a big school for small children in heavy traffic on and around the Mileground, and you are left with a local newspaper that has said far too little, far too late, with much too shallow concern for the safety and well-being of students in Monongalia County Schools.