Letter to the editor

Here is a copy of the letter I sent to the editor that is supposed to be published Next Tuesday in the Waverly Independent.

Dear Editor,

I felt the need to write this letter because I served on the Nashua Plainfield Community School Districts Long Range Planning Committee. I will admit that in the end I did not attend very many meetings. The primary reason for this is I felt the meetings to be overly long with a foregone conclusion and that my inclusion on the committee was to simply give it an air of unbiased community participation.

I don’t feel that the members represented a large cross section of the community but were instead hand picked to deliver the wanted conclusion. I also felt uncomfortable and that it was inappropriate for an employee of Gardner Architecture serving on the committee and especially serving as the de-facto chair of this committee. I don’t believe anything untoward happened: however; I think it was a case of “Caesar’s Wife” that elected officials and public entities should not even have the appearance of inappropriateness.

Having grown up doing my best to live within my means and doing the best I could with what I have it is my firm belief that for the most part the majority of the “recommendations” from the committee are luxury wants and not really needs. The primary one dealing with Athletic Curriculum / Community Wellness / Performing Arts. The main questions in regards to this are, “Why, for so many years with more students where the current facilities adequate?” and “Why, now with declining enrollment do we need more gym space and a performing arts center.”

In the January 2011 Husky Hotline, Brian Bierschenk, School Board President and Randy Strabala, Superintendent wrote, “In order to better market to potential businesses and families looking to relocate or establish themselves in the area, the school system must be able to offer education, programs, facilities, extracurricular activities etc. at a minimum of, equal to, or better than other surrounding school districts. Enrollment numbers have been, currently are, and will continue to decline for the foreseeable future. Overall improvements to the school district would be a necessary step to help curb these declining numbers, or hopefully, even reverse the trend.” There was never any statistical evidence given to support this hypothesis. Only anecdotal evidence primarily in the case of Postville’s recent building projects and other school districts building projects of which Gardner Architecture had direct involvement in.

In my opinion their solution to our declining enrollment is what I like to call “The field of dreams syndrome” or “if you build it they will come.” If their theory is correct, then we all ought to be packing up and moving to Waverly or Postville or other communities, where large scale school building projects have occurred, in droves, because let’s be honest, even if we could afford facilities to match Waverly and Postville’s specifically or other towns we could never realistically maintain them. The W in Waverly is not even self sufficient requiring a large yearly contribution from the city to remain functional.

And while the administration has stated its desire to help curb declining numbers it purchased three homes which I assume it plans to demolish. It is highly unlikely that these three house could be replaced for what they were purchased for thereby shrinking the already small affordable housing pool.

In my humble opinion the only real hope for our school is to choose what it will excel in and then pursue it with unwavering single mindedness. Personally I believe that the one and only purpose of school should be education and that when cuts are made they should be made in extracurricular activities first, hence the name extracurricular. Many will disagree with me but I really don’t see a lot of jobs where a major requirement is being a first string starter. And while it’s been a while since I took my ACT’s, I don’t recall there being an athletic section. If you look at our district’s annual progress report while it shows some improvement in our 8^th grade math and reading scores they are still below state averages. Again, on that report there is no section that ranks our standing in any athletic event.

Could we use more athletic practice space? Sure. A performing arts center? That would be nice. But maybe instead of building our own, which would sit empty the majority of the time like our current facilities, (do the math estimate 14 hour days say 8am to 10pm 365 days a year and I believe they are empty more then they are in use) we ought to partner with existing facilities, like the YMCA in Charles City or the W in Waverly. I believe that for a mere fraction of what we have already spent on property acquisition we could rent the needed facilities in areas around us. Would it mean driving farther? Sure. But we already drive to Charles City and Waverly for groceries, auto parts, Wal-Mart, K-mart and a host of other things we need that are never going to be available in our communities.

The reality is that our towns are bedroom communities. We need to face that fact, accept it, and then seek ways to capitalize on that instead of thinking that “if we build it they will come.”

Shawn Geer

These are pictures of the three properties the school is going to acquire to tear down to make room for whatever.

I think 3 families with children could have lived very nicely in these homes.