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Found answer in letters

To the editor:

Lately every morning one of the first things I do is go to the front door to retrieve your paper (Independent) and look for new letters to the editor. The last two, three weeks I found an answer, while reading the various letters, to a question that has been plaguing me for a while.

Why does the school board want to get rid of another grade school, namely West Side Elementary, and have it torn down? It isn’t because the bare lot will be worth a lot of money. After demolition, the value of the land will be a mere fraction of the demo costs. But the recent letters have enlightened me.

As mentioned by others in previous letters, the public was led to believe that A) they didn’t need the space and B) it was going to cost a fortune to rehab East Side. I bought that because Holy Redeemer School has 245 (1-8), Marshall Area Christian (now True Light) has 51 (1-6), Samuel Lutheran has 42 (1-6) and there are 56 home-schooled. That is a lot (394+), so OK, I believed the story.

But now they all of a sudden want to tear down West Side and build a new school for $20 million-plus. Ouch.

I firmly believe that someone wants a new work space and they are tearing West Side down so the rest of us won’t drive by it for the next 10 to 20 years and see that it is still in use — by someone else. The evidence will be gone and our memories are short. The problem is that the bonds will not be gone for 20 to 30 years. Most of the current employees will be long gone cashing their retirement checks.

Let’s drop the numbers, rehab West Side. Put on a sloped roof, run A/C ducts under the new roof, on top of the old, new windows, kitchen, new boiler (like MACS/True Light did at East Side). On and on. It doesn’t take consultants to figure out what we should do. Only common sense and not the public checkbook.

Steve Otto

Marshall

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