Sell the High School, Keep the Cannolis
It was a standard meeting of the city council and school board. We had
reached a consensus and it was wrong. The issue was selling the Harrisonburg
High School property, and there were two potential suitors, neither of which was
JMU. What a majority of both boards agreed on then, 18 months ago, was that the
topic should not be public.
There was no reason to get people worked up about something that might not
happen, argued one participant, while another agreed that there would be some
opposition to anything. (His tone suggested that you don’t want to give the
opposition a fighting chance.) Another said we should get our ducks in a row
before any public discussion.
The right answer would have been to decide if we wanted to sell the thing and
put it on the market, openly and honestly. That didn’t happen, and now the ducks
are swimming in a lot of directions. The current discussion about a lease to JMU
is muddied by the social realities of town-gown relations and by the political
realities of relations between board and council, not to mention the ambitions
of their members.
Political and social realities can change. Facts can’t. Here are some.
Since the current round of discussions began in June 2000 about the next school
building the city needed to build, a stumbling block has been the size of the
current HHS and the investment in it. It was too big for an elementary, and
wouldn’t fetch enough on the market to pay for a replacement.
(Yes, the county reuses its high schools as middle schools, but the county
doesn’t have one of the best pure middle schools in the state; Thomas Harrison
is a model of design and execution, with a richly honored faculty teaching in a
facility conceived and built precisely for middle school teaching.)
The HHS complex is unfortunately trashed from decades of time, money and effort
invested and sometimes wasted in trying to make it something it’s not, and what
it’s not is a modern educational facility that can prepare students for 21st
century challenges. It’s a maze and a warren. It was a good building where we
went a renovation too far in honest and heartfelt efforts to keep a heritage
alive.
But sentimentality can’t pay the bills, especially not if you’re talking about a
couple hundred thousand square feet of space that needs to be heated, cooled and
maintained. If JMU can find a use for it and can lease it for enough to give the
city a start toward building a fifth elementary school, then the city’s school
kids can benefit from the tuition being paid by the children of Northern
Virginia. Income redistribution, Valley style.
That’s why various people with the city of Harrisonburg have been trying since
at least as early as 2000 to find a way to interest JMU in HHS. The university
is the logical tenant for a building the school system has outgrown and should
pass by. It’s not a new issue. But it’s an issue that should have been discussed
openly since the first time the city approached JMU. The way the city government
has handled the issue has made it look like there’s something to hide. There’s
probably not. Secrecy is just the mindset of some politicians.
Part of my job at JMU right now consists of helping with the move into a
renovated building that will hold five departments and has room for about four
and a quarter. That’s no secret and I suppose I won’t be fired for mentioning it
(or for writing this without approval from above). JMU is crunched, cramped and
crowded when it comes to space. According to some twisted state formulas that
would baffle Isaac Newton, the university has used some space more than 100
percent of the time and the available space is less than zero. That means two
things. One is that the state needs to rewrite the formulas and the other is
that JMU needs to find space.
And the space it needs is for offices and classrooms, not for dorms. Too many
people, when they speak of JMU expanding, imagine all-night parties and
mall-type traffic. But the people I work with drive to work in the morning and
go home in the afternoon, and incidentally some of them wonder where their sixth
graders are going to school year after next. Their parties are barbecues and
their traffic is not much different from what’s at HHS now.
JMU’s going to grow, and from a purely financial standpoint, that’s a good thing
for Harrisonburg. The amount of sales and meals tax collected from students
makes us an affluent city regardless of how much poor-mouthing goes on at budget
time every year. It’s been almost 15 years since the city’s Comprehensive Plan
defined JMU as the engine driving the city, and nothing has happened since to
refute that judgment. One hopes this plan will be judged not on how poorly the
city handled it, but rather on what a boon JMU is to this city, and what a
boondock we’d be without it.
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