New Woodburn Community School

HAND-IN-HAND WITH BAD ADMINISTRATION AT MON SCHOOLS

While the signs have been bad the past two or three years, preceding the opening of Eastwood Elementary on the Mileground, the facts and the science have been worse, as documented at this site in extensive detail.

But the many telling signs continue to be foreboding, including the most recent one: yesterday a student was struck by a car “brushing” past him and his mother on Parsons Street by Woodburn Elementary. Amazing this hasn’t happened long since, so badly has Mon Schools neglected the Woodburn Elementary campus. There are zero sidewalks there on Parsons Street where it cuts through the middle of the Woodburn Elementary campus. No sidewalks along this crumbling stretch daily full of students, parents, teachers, and others. Sidewalks are a basic safety feature. Mon Schools knows this, is required to know this. Why has it provided no sidewalks on this heavily walked street that runs not along but through the school campus and is ringed by parking? Mon Schools has not even painted simple crosswalks. And Parsons Street also lacks even a stop sign, and no crosswalk either, amazingly, where it bisects the campus and comes to a T at Fortney Street. Why does Mon Schools persist with a third world mentality at the expense of its students and their parents? Why no badly needed and pedestrian-friendly safety basics and improvements?

It was the city that built the sidewalk along the playground on both Fortney Street and Richwood Avenue. It is the city that pays for the Charles Avenue crossing guard. What has Mon Schools done? Mon Schools has packed the Woodburn Elementary campus with more students this year than ever before without making any badly needed safety and space improvements. The campus was already badly neglected by Mon Schools. And now this year, the small art room in the all-purpose outbuilding has been converted into a regular third grade classroom because Mon Schools loaded up the campus with more students than ever. The art teacher now “floats.”

More and more students at Woodburn coupled with no sidewalks provided on the street that bisects the campus – Mon Schools and student safety, hand-in-hand? Hardly. Could the signs be any worse for Mon Schools’ plan to move all the Woodburn Elementary and Easton Elementary students to the Eastwood Elementary site, there at the smash-and-crash 705/119 Mileground commuter corridor intersection? It’s all too easy to read the signs.

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