Be Like The Other Kids

I don’t care what the other kids are wearing, it’s cold outside and you will wear your coat. Now put it on and get off to school.
Early lessons from parents often deal with the contrasts between what others do and what you are allowed to do. Yet like most lessons in life, there are exceptions.
Marietta is one of only three school districts that border the Ohio River between Stubenville and Portsmouth that have not built new schools in recent years. They have not chosen as yet to take advantage of the state funded participation in new buildings. Perhaps it’s time we consider doing what the rest have done.
As recently reported, all the permanent improvement monies spent to date from the levy passed two years ago have been spent conservatively with an eye toward larger goals. Further, our investments in property have been limited to maintaining responsibly what we have with a first obligation being safety of students and staff.
We will continue in this manner until we have an opportunity to tell the larger story about what our future can look like and obtain voter approval to move toward that future. That time is drawing ever closer.
We have recently received the results of the professionally done real estate appraisals of our buildings. Thank you, Mike McCarthy. Harmar $672,000. Putnam $137,500. Middle School, $2,000,000. North Hills, which was appraised a few years ago, $275,000
We have no appraisal as yet on Phillips or Washington at this time.
A curiosity in our properties is that the school system does not own the property on which Washington School stands. Technically it belongs to the city of Marietta. Which makes it a rather challenging property for any future owner and thus impacts its value.
The many other districts that have built new schools in recent years have had their own reasons for doing so. Those reasons probably parallel our reasons for considering such an ambitious but timely project.
Security always tops the list these days. Our current buildings do not lend themselves to the demands of modern security requirements. To retrofit the existing buildings to assure the level of security we should expect is prohibitively expensive.
Next comes the opportunity to take advantage of “free” money. Of course it is not free. It always comes from taxpayers. But this time we have a chance to get some of it back toward our local project. When that opportunity disappears, we will have to pay the entire bill ourselves.
Improved programming possibilities with new facilities will assist our learning process and make our resources more productive. There are many things we can do with new buildings that are not possible with such a widespread array of current facilities.
Operational savings figure in the overall equation. With our scattered buildings we cannot easily adjust class size. Having all our grade school classes under one roof would make an easy adjustment to allow for changing class sizes. One teacher more or less at a grade level could make a huge difference to a student’s educational experience. And provide system flexibility.
Further operational savings on a maintenance level are achievable as we focus on fewer buildings, fewer roofs, fewer everything, not to mention newer, which will have positive impact on repairs at least in the early years.
New buildings will allow us to have larger classrooms more suited to modern teaching methods, equipment and requirements and keep class sizes minimal. Current facilities were designed for needs that are now decades old. Our students deserve up to date facilities and programming.
Stay tuned. More to follow.