SUNCREST PRIMARY / NORTH ELEMENTARY PARENTS BEWARE
Fire departments, police departments, the Department of Environmental Protection, and other agencies are currently checking and testing the grounds of Skyview Elementary trying to figure out what made people dizzy and nauseous this morning, sending one teacher to the hospital and forcing the evacuation and closure of the school for the day at least. Currently suspected are pollutants – gases, toxins? – coming in the from the outside. From where would such pollutants originate? From incompetent school siting decisions.
[Update: Problem found inside the school. This time. WAJR reports: “faulty heat exchanger…”
Monongalia County Schools is in the process of siting another new elementary school. The parents of Suncrest Primary and North Elementary students would be well advised to oversee and direct the process themselves. Otherwise they might end up with another lousy school siting like Skyview Elementary, University High School, Eastwood Elementary, and Mylan Park Elementary. The Mon Schools administration and school board has proven to be neither trustworthy nor competent in matters of school siting, at the least, as we have documented here in great detail.
The Skyview Elementary siting uphill from an ever-growing industrial park is an ongoing travesty, as we have regular occasion to note. See our archives for much additional information. For example:
Skyview Elementary To Be Hit By Gas Well Air Pollution?
May 25, 2011
ANOTHER NEGLIGENT MON SCHOOLS ELEMENTARY SITE
Remember what we wrote about the asinine location of Skyview Elementary in 2010?:
Opened in 2006, Skyview (consolidated) Elementary sits far from residential areas and uphill from Morgantown Industrial Park. Think about that for a moment. What a brilliant location for the lungs of young children! Now, with an impending new road and upgraded water and sewer lines, the Industrial Park is set to expand.
First, such school siting is flat wrong in more ways than one as we have documented in detail at this site. Schools and schoolchildren benefit from being located in neighborhoods. And vice versa.
Second, in 2009, Skyview Elementary had to be closed in the midst of the school day (along with next-door Westwood Middle) due to Industrial Park “smoke [that] got into the schools’ ventilation systems and filled the buildings with smoke.”
During such an incident the previous year apparently, the students were not evacuated and “had to deal with it.” One wonders (and the School District should test for) what difficult-to-detect toxins on a more regular basis pass into the school ventilation systems there above the soon to expand Industrial Park.
Well now it only gets worse with the gas wells in place in the industrial park. Bring on the additional air pollution, which is extremely hazardous for young children – Daily Mail:
Duane Nichols, spokesman for the Mon Valley Clean Air Coalition, said the two well sites are too close to the Skyview Elementary and Westwood Middle schools, just off River Road, as well as to the area’s water supply and the other facilities in the Morgantown Industrial Park.
“And this is just the first of more wells to come,” he said. “We’re all going to be in a state of emotional distress.”
Bartolo said he understands there’s concern for the public welfare and what sort of impact Marcellus shale drilling could have on water and air.
“It makes sense to me with that kind of impact looming over us that somebody puts the brakes on this and further investigates it,” he said.
And now “a fixed frac water recycling facility in the Morgantown Industrial Park” is moving in on Skyview Elementary. What’s next, a nuclear waste dump? That’s what happens when Mon Schools sites schools with great negligence: the unknowable and the uncontrollable.
The Fate of Skyview Elementary
July 29, 2010
Should Skyview Elementary School be closed permanently? 3 years and done? Should it have been built in the first place?
Photos of Skyview Elementary playground, summer 2010:
New Woodburn Community School 
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