http://loudoun.gov/Default.aspx?tabid=1698
Impressions so far:
Is Lori Waters serious? SELL land in this market? Still focusing on building stadia for schools while we're having difficulty providing basic services? GET REAL. Where are her priorities?
YES, kids need places to play, but (at the risk of sounding very "get off my lawn-ish") my high school football team had to travel to the BRONX to play, and they were still division champs. They had to sell candy and get sponsorships to buy uniforms and pay for the bus to get them to the field and THEY WERE STILL DIVISION CHAMPS.
When I went there, our "ball fields" were Stuyvesant Park, a two-block-square city park down the street from us, that we shared with the Society of Friends School across the way.
And yet, we consistently ranked (and still do) among the top schools in the country.
And now they're housed in the bottom portion of a skyscraper, with an apartment building above them. Which is how they paid to get a state-of-the-art gymnasium with pool (at the old building where I went, no pool). The residents of the apartment building get to use the gymnasium facilities in the evenings and on the weekends - which pays for upkeep on those facilities.
Granted, Stuyvesant is a competitive admissions High School. Also granted, I got in by the skin of my teeth. HOWEVER, the point I'm trying to make is that you do not need a fireplacing FOOTBALL STADIUM to get a good education. You don't even need one to have a good football team.
You will NEVER EVER get me to agree that buying 70 acres to build a high school is reasonable. Not in this or any other economy.
Loudoun county has plenty of completely empty office buildings. Why can't we use one of them for a high school?
Obviously, I can relate to our shared experience. I was on the bowling team and we had to have a bowl-a-thon each year to pay for our matches and practice. We had to give back our bowling shirts each year. That's how the budget was back then. 70 acres sounds insanely large compared to what we had.....
ReplyDeleteLiz, I think using the vacant office buildings is an outstanding idea. There's a nice big empty one at the corner of Lansdowne Blvd. & Riverside Parkway that would be perfect. And it even has a lot of land around if they wanted to build a flippin' field.
ReplyDeleteNow that I think about it, we won the state football title in NJ back in '82, and we didn't have a field, either. We had to WALK, in full pads, to the public school down the street and use their field. Yet we survived. In a school with no AC, too. Dressed in sport coats & ties. In May.
Get off my lawn!! (haha...)
Hi Paul!!! Welcome, Dave!
ReplyDelete