New Philadelphia school levy vote addresses urgent issues

A new version of the New Philadelphia school district levy is coming up for a vote soon. I worry most people still don't really know what's going on in our schools.

1. The rooms boil in the summer with no a/c, hitting 90 to 100 degrees. Imagine teaching a room of third graders through that.

2. A failing septic tank that caused a whole school full of first graders to not be allowed to go to the bathroom at the school until it was fixed. First graders not allowed to pee at school an entire school day.

3. Ceilings that leak dirty rainwater caught by buckets.

4. Ceiling and floors threatening to cave in - with portions of some schools being blocked off.

5. Boilers on their last legs, that will be murder to replace/repair.

6. Classrooms without real walls having to contend with the noise from the classroom next door.

7. Nothing is fire safe in aging buildings that contain hundreds of children.

8. How many decades have we had a prodigiously large bat colony living inside the high school?

9. Due to state grade banding requirements and a dearth of buses and drivers, parents may have to pick up from three or four different locations and kids are spending too much time stuck on the buses.

We have four kids, two of whom are in the Phila system. These are things we've seen with our own eyes, and that our kids have experienced.

I'm told that it's simply a matter of time before the problems at these buildings get bad enough that they are condemned. When enough of the buildings crumble, the state will come in, and the New Philadelphia school district will simply no longer exist because there are not enough suitable buildings to teach the number of kids we have.

Right now, there is the massive state grant to pay for this. It's not guaranteed to last forever, especially with how the Ohio legislature has been slashing funding for education left and right. This is money with an expiration date.

It's also money that if we accept, will help keep the excellent teachers that we have. These buildings are from the 1920s, and we're about to be facing a choice between paying teachers or not having a building for them to teach in.

We have to spend money on buildings either way. We can either spend all at once on a new building for efficiency, or we can spend significantly more over time on bad investments in crumbling infrastructure on its last legs. The money spent also isn’t going to disappear into the aether, but is going to benefit local businesses and help keep young families in the area to help boost our economy.

There has been a lot of anger and distrust directed at past school officials over the years, but at this point, the kids are the ones suffering.

Gregory J. McCleery, Esq.

New Philadelphia