In the IT business one often acquires retired equipment, usually PCs, monitors, etc. that are well past the threshold of usability due to antiquated specs. However, with a bit of elbow grease they can be made into perfectly usable machines for users on a budget and/or those who are content to run older operating systems, applications, etc.
I once had a stable of PCs such as these and offered them to my cousin who is an elementary school principal. My thought was that they might be useful as platforms for simple scholastic math, science, history, etc. programs.
Without malice he laughed right in my face. "Have you seen our computer lab?" he replied. "We have 30 state-of-the-art machines, flat-panel monitors, the works." Momentarily stunned, I mentally added it to the list of goodies lavished upon schools that are never mentioned when teachers and their sympathizers have a moan about wages and benefits.
In Morgantown the battle is over a new school. Not just another soulless consolidation school rammed down the throats of students, parents and those paying the freight (i.e. property taxpayers) - no, this would be a new GREEN school. Not the color green, mind, but a school with all manner of energy-saving systems built with environmentally-friendly construction materials (all very well provided you don't notice the chemical holocausts foisted upon dirt-poor Chinese villages where those green batteries are made). Scratch an 'educator' and you expose a liberal which means they are still true believers in the global warming hoax. A green school, therefore, represents the apex of all their various fantasies: moral superiority, children indoctrinated into the AGW myth simply by walking through the door each day, and a show pony for school board members, district administrators and others who - let's face it - aren't terribly interested in the three R's.
Best of all, the feds are paying for it! You see, espousing the proper viewpoints on environmental issues isn't just for cocktail parties and student projects entitled 'How Mom & Dad Are Killing The Earth.' In this case it actually gets you a school built courtesy of Uncle Sam! Skylights, fluorescent lights, recirculated air, etc. But wait, you say, weren't these part of the first wave of 'new' schools built in the 60s and 70s? Why yes they were, but we didn't call them GREEN! A green school is certified by, er, experts on greenness. Their serene, benevolent knowledge of what is good for Mother Earth is self-proclaimed but when Uncle Sam's dollars are on offer you don't question the experts!
In a university town the pressure for the local school system to keep up with the college Joneses on the political correctness front is immense which is why superintendent Frank Devono was over the moon when handed an opportunity to out-green the greens on campus! You shall go to the Earth Day Ball!
There were the small matters of finding a site for the school and rounding up the students whose good fortune it would be to be photographed entering this shrine of greenness! The educators decided that two elementary schools would be closed and their student bodies consolidated into one new, vibrant green group.
In West Virginia school consolidation has been a shambles especially at the secondary level. Communities treasured their local high schools as the nexus - along with churches - of local life. The schools also had something church did not - sports. Pride in the local athletic teams and year-round displays of colors, logos and nicknames gave each small town and its residents tucked away in the mountains an identity even (or especially) when they ventured to the bigger cities.
Politicians, always looking to combine their voter base in order to make pandering an easier task, announced that school consolidation was the way forward. We can offer more programs and more opportunities, they said. National and state educational 'experts' (them again) agreed. Nobody bothered to ask the teachers, students and parents who liked their existing, if aging, schools and if they did ask the answers were ignored. Who cared if teachers did a fantastic job of mentoring students in and out of the classroom simply because they knew their families personally and felt a sense of duty beyond lesson plans? This was progress, dammit, and a sense of community identity was nothing alongside the chance to cut a ribbon in front of a soulless concrete and glass County Consolidated High School. And so community identities were stripped overnight, the usual meaningless, inoffensive generic nicknames like Eagles, Falcons, or Knights were chosen (no Applemen or Hillbillies or Farmers for them thank you very much) and the daily nightmare of busing kids across rugged terrain began. Majestic and unique architecture might have been appropriate for the first half of the 20th Century but consolidated schools relied on a bloodless, practical geometry that would have brought a tear to the eye of any good East German.
Those community high schools produced alumni with a great affection for their school, teachers and classmates and reunions are chock-full of fond remembrances. Reunions at consolidated schools, when they are held and, more crucially, when they are actually attended, have all the charm of your last trip to Wal-Mart. Sheer numbers mean that many students never get acquainted even after attending for four years - what would they have to reminisce about?
But consolidation, like green, is good, they tell us. Oh, but hang on. It seems that many parents, some of them no doubt products of consolidated schools, want to keep their neighborhood elementary! They like knowing all the kids and their parents. They like having the school within walking distance or a quick car commute. And these parents have no interest in a new school elsewhere, green or any other color.
They're bucking the system! They should be grateful that their offspring will be fodder for all those green dreams! Don't they know the oceans will boil, the skies will rain fire and the polar bears will be in for a long swim if they don't get with the program?
And then there's the small matter of a site. West Virginia isn't called The Mountain State because of one or two impressive but isolated mountain ranges. Instead, there is a sizeable hill in just about every direction. Clearing and grading land parcels for large developments like retail or schools is expensive and time-consuming. It just so happens that a large, flat parcel of land is equidistant from the two schools marked for closure. And the land is used for agronomy work by the university which means it’s already timbered and relatively flat! Surely they would part with it especially given the politically correct mission of a green school.
Oh but hang on (again). That site just happens to be adjacent to the T-junction from hell known as the intersection of the Mileground and WV Rte 705. A staggering volume of vehicles both commercial and private pass through this intersection on the way to and from the university, the hospital complex, the offices, banks and clinics surrounding them, etc. It’s not unusual to see cars stacked up in the left-turn lane for 0.5 miles (despite a total lack of oncoming traffic – it’s a T-junction after all). When they added a right-turn lane (a simple and practical act) all were so grateful that they actually dedicated it and erected a sign! Other places have entire roads and streets named after people but this particular bottleneck was so bad that they named just one lane after a person!
It’s an area, then, that sees a near-constant stream of idling vehicles, many of them pickup trucks, minivans, and SUVs – in short, a greenie’s nightmare. Anyone with or without a lick of common sense can see that adding a school with its morning-and-afternoon bus and parent-vehicle traffic to the mix will convert a bottleneck into total gridlock. Imagine waiting 20 minutes to make a left turn only to be held for another 10 minutes by a crossing guard while 15 school buses rumble out of the parking lot. 30 minutes to travel less than one mile all while burning gasoline costing $3.50/gal or more!
“Madness,” you might think and rightly so. But madness is already part of everyday life for some in the form of AGW hysteria. The site will not change. The school will be green even if it’s surrounded by very brown, black and grey shades of vehicle exhaust!
The parents (the ones who are supposedly too apathetic to care and whose role as providers of nourishment is to be supplanted by the schools) opposed to the school are challenging the establishment and location of the green school. Those ingrates are asking legitimate procedural and legal questions about the actions of the superintendent and the board. And what’s this? FOIA requests? How dare they! And so the superintendent decides – independent of any precedent, rule, law or policy – that each request will cost a nominal fee for processing, postage, etc. 35 cents here, 50 cents there. Stamps aren’t cheap, he says. But wait – aren’t these requests being filed, filled and returned electronically i.e. without the use of any paper or postal mail at all (very green, you might say)?
But it doesn’t matter to the ‘educators.’ Their show pony, their calling card, their ticket to hosannas from the greater green movement (they dream of Obama attending the grand opening but they don’t dare verbalize it yet) is being threatened, which means a serious digging in of heels. Green schools may be the future, but bureaucracy is a time-tested specialty of the educational establishment. Nobody, except perhaps the DMV or the Post Office, can sap the enemy’s morale like a front-line secretary in a government office who will demand forms, signatures, stamps, approvals, and photocopies until the enemy forgets why he asked in the first place or at least is very sorry he did so. You see, green is good. You might even say green is God to some people and they will act and react with a distinctly religious fervor when their faith is questioned.
