Possible sale of junior high is wrong

Dear West Bonner County School Board:

Evidently, you are in discussions to sell the Priest River Jr. High School building. There are many in the community that object to selling the school, I agree with them and am strongly opposed to this sale for numerous reasons listed below. Also, a decision of this magnitude should be put before the local citizens for their input and or vote.

• The Priest River Jr. High has historical connections to Priest River

• It also has historical connections to the United States as a whole since it was built by the WPA during the Great Depression. Young people today probably don’t even know what the WPA was.

• Rumor has it that you would put the students that are there now in other existing school buildings and portable classrooms. I refer to them as outhouses. The result of having kids scattered all over the place will be a negative on their learning process.

• Portable classrooms would need plumbing and electrical, in addition to the cost of the building itself, which would be expensive.

• Then the next thing that would come up, is you would want a bond to build a new school costing the taxpayers millions. Those of us who are elderly weren’t born yesterday and can see this would be the next step. Then everyone would say, why did you sell the junior high in the first place?

• Supposedly you hired an outside firm for analysis of costs to bring the schools up to date. Having been a business owner in Priest River and having seen a lot of things thru the years, I know that when you hire such a firm, to justify what you are paying them, they put everything in the proposals, but the kitchen sink. They want to bring the building up to Utopia costing millions. We conservatives think that millions is a bunch of bunk. Maybe some things could be taken care of gradually, but each expenditure should be examed. Well, this is Priest River, Idaho, not a high-income area, our citizens are not millionaires. My belief is that the building should be kept and do whatever is necessary a little bit at a time.

• This building is solidly built. It is more solid than any new school you would build or have been built in P.R, such as the high school or the grade school. Maybe it needs some upgrades, granted, but doesn’t have to be the Taj Mahal. My wife is French and we have visited there many times. There, they are still using buildings 200 and 300 years old. My father came from Austria. The building he went to school in, in the 1890s is still standing and still in use, because, as in Europe they built strong cement buildings, built to last, just like the junior high building

• In Sandpoint, the old high school, then the junior high building was deemed unfit for occupancy, so a new school was built to replace it. But that building was sold and is still in use today.

• In addition, the junior high has a large field for sports activities and P.E., how are you going to replace that?

So, in conclusion, as mentioned, a decision of this importance should be put to a vote if you want to maintain the small-town togetherness, otherwise, it will appear as a big-city type of action and we old-timers just don’t like that. We want a say so.

ROGER GREGORY

Priest River