Bill Marvel: Window to KHS

The new high school resulted from a long and concerted effort. For several years, proponents of a new school took every opportunity to plead their case, while the school board seemed intent on adding new programs to the curriculum that would eat up the remaining space at the old school. Disparaging the crowding and conditions at the combined Kennett Junior and Senior High School became a favorite topic of conversation. Administrators organized several tours of the building for the press and public, and I took a couple of them myself. I remember suspecting that some maintenance issues seemed to be left unresolved, lest repairs diminish the apparent urgency, and that the time devoted to tours might have been spent fixing some of them. 

Alarmist predictions of skyrocketing enrollment offered the greatest ammunition to the new-school lobby, and enrollment did jump sharply from 1995 until 2003, when the six grades totaled 1,363 students. State standards helped justify staff and parental desires, and in its infinite wisdom our school board chose to solve this "crisis" in the most expensive and disruptive way possible — which seems to be a habit with that body, regardless of who sits on the board. 

Rather than build a junior high for 400 or 500 students, and renovate the high school from which three generations of my family graduated, the board went whole hog and proposed a huge new high school. The old high school was demoted to a "middle" school, and was expensively renovated to serve less than one-quarter of the former student body. A middle school traditionally houses three grades, and there circulated a song and dance about incorporating the sixth grades from the elementary schools, to relieve crowding there, but it never happened. Eventually, steps were taken that assured no such thing ever would happen. 

As school boards always know, special meetings are the easiest way to pass unpopular expenditures, and that was how the Conway board passed the construction bond for all this new work, in the fall of 2003. In their haste to push that $44,345,600 question through, they somehow "forgot" some of the seemingly crucial equipment and furnishings they had promised to provide for the new facilities, such as desks, doors — and windows, perhaps? In March of 2006 they sought a "supplementary" bond of $2.5 million to finish the job they had assured us they could do with the first bond. 

It may have been then that the school board finally decided to turn frugal, and bought windows (and how many other components?) that might not disintegrate until the last of their terms had expired. Let future boards confront the embarrassment, and let future taxpayers bear the expense for what was really only the last in a long series of bad decisions that led to enormous and unnecessary costs. 

Last October, the combined enrollment for Kennett High School and the so-called middle school was only 994 students — 27 percent fewer than when the bond was approved, after which enrollment slid into a steady decline. Only 713 of those kids attended the high school — and even with abundant staff, the halls must already have been echoing before everyone fled for home in March. 

Over a human lifetime, the Conway School Board has cultivated a reputation for neglecting its existing buildings to pursue new construction projects with empty space that screams for filling-up. Then the cycle begins anew, in what I'll characterize as systemic improvidence. Much of the $47 million in bonds from 2003 and 2006 paid for facilities to address an enrollment explosion that never came, but all the superfluous space quickly inspired proposals for expensive new programs. The crumbling windows surely don't represent all the funds that were squandered in that penny-wise, pound-foolish project, but the window fiasco is by far the easiest one for the public to see through.

William Marvel lives in South Conway.