The District retreats/compromises take your pick

I went to the School Board’s Committee of the Whole tonight to look at the plans for Lester Park and Ordean. The graphic for Lester Park was up on the big screen when I walked in and the first thing I noticed that the proposed parking lots across from the school were no where in the schematics. They only needed to be because the logistics of the bloated plan required houses to be taken to make room for the generation’s worth of construction meant to be crammed into a five year span.

Frankly my impression was very favorable. Its just the sort of plan on a single block always envisioned by the School Board permitting Ridgewood and Lester Park to be joined together in a single building.

Ordean was another matter. The poor architects of ARI had almost completely surrendered to the angry Ordean neighbors to the building’s west. They moved things around and the schematic had the feel of a telephone booth packed with college students trying to set a record for bodies in a booth.

MNDOT having icily dismissed a London Road exit – which the haphazard JCI designers had never bothered to consult – was dropped. If the school was to be built under this plan it would still become apparent that more property would have to be acquired to let it breath. Perhaps a new School Board would start breathing down the necks of the smaller more modest homes to the Schools East. Its still a desperately inadequate plan even if the current Board pledges never to expand the site.

Dr. Dixon in his traditional peroration, a blessedly short half hour version, mentioned that he had suggested closing the lunch hour to all the new high school students to keep them out of the neighborhood’s hair. Good luck with that. Half again as many students all relocated from the school they are being booted out of confined with locked doors with a low morale staff. Its the kind of plan dreams are made of. These particular dreams are called nightmares.

The question for the Ordean neighbors is simply this: Can you trust such a School Board? Can you trust JCI. JCI will get to sell more air conditioners. What do they care?

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