Troy High School Facing Grim Future Dilapidated Buildings Victim Of Funding War

Troy and Deary are separated by just 11 miles of rolling hills, but it may as well be a brick wall when it comes to fixing the communtiy’s crumbling high school.

One Whitepine School Board member calls Troy Junior-Senior High School “the albatross” - a 93-year-old building with bad wiring, insufficient fire exits and no handicapped access. The school failed its last two state safety inspections.

The moniker is even more fitting given the bitter divide the school has created among residents in these towns outside Moscow.

“It’s really an emotional thing,” Troy High School Principal Conrad Underdahl said. “Schools tend to be communities hearts. When you start playing with that, you start jerking on people’s emotions.”

A $7.2 million bond to build a new high school between Troy and Deary failed last month, and many say a new one has little hope of passing. Only one bond has succeeded in Whitepine in the last 27 years - and that was by 16 votes.

Many residents of Deary and the neighboring towns of Bovill and Elk River support a proposal to split the district, divorcing them selves from the funding problems in Troy.

“We’ve been married 50 years and it has never worked,” school bus driver Glen Hockins said as he drank coffee at Fuzzy’s Fine Food in downtown Deary.

But district administrators say a split just isn’t feasible.

The district has about $243 million in property value, but only $77 million of that is in Troy, Superintendent Harold Ott said.

Troy’s bonding capacity would never be enough to build a new high school, Ott said.

So Whitepine administrators are appealing to the state. Ott submitted 50 pages of documents to the president of the state Board of Education last week, including copies of failed safety inspections calling for Troy High School to close and recent state accreditation reports saying simply, “You need a new school.” The list of repairs totals about $3.3 million, he said.

Whitepine is also one of more than 30 districts in the state, including 16 in North Idaho, involved in an ongoing legal battle. The schools charge that the state is responsible for providing adequate buildings. The state contends that the lawsuit is improper, saying that school facilities have historically been funded locally.

Idaho is the only state in the country that requires a two-thirds majority to pass school bonds and does not provide any funding for school buildings.

The state Board of Education asked every district in Idaho this month to submit a list of school safety concerns and their estimated costs.

State education officials will review the requests next week, but it is unclear how the repairs would be funded, said Jerry Pelton, deputy superintendent for finance and support services.

“There’s been no money earmarked or even officially discussed for this purpose,” Pelton said.

But Ott and others in Whitepine are hoping the state will free up some endowment money or funds from the state’s recent settlement with tobacco companies to fix the schools.

If not, the fate of the other schools in the Whitepine District - Deary School, Bovill Elementary and Troy Elementary - could be at stake. State officials have told the district that if Troy High School is not accredited for two years in a row, the entire district will lose its state funding.

So far, the school’s safety problems have not prevented it from being accredited.

That’s likely to change, Underdahl said.

“Those issues will stop us from being accredited,” he said, adding that he’s optimistic that help will come before that happens.

And that’s just what students at Troy High School, who admit they don’t feel very safe at their school, hope.

“It’s very disappointing we have to go to a school like this,” said Bob Uebelher, 18, student council president. “The communities are getting farther and farther apart.”

Maintenance workers pumped a thousand gallons of water out of the school cafeteria during Thanksgiving break, Underdahl said.

Water routinely floods the school because it was built around a now-crumbling rock formation. Open a storage closet off the cafeteria that’s filled with bags of powdered milk and you’ll see the jagged and eroding wall of gray shale.

Thirty or more girls cram a locker room built for seven that sits next to the school’s 1940s-era low-pressure boiler. The only fire exit is a narrow door leading to an even narrower hallway.

“It’s very cozy,” said a girl with a blond ponytail.

The chemistry lab is directly above the boiler room.

“This building has served its purpose and needs to be abandoned,” Underdahl said. In Deary, where just 26 percent of voters supported the recent bond, residents say the consolidation proposal was too chaotic. Voters weren’t given enough information about where the new school would be located and how their money would be spent, they say.

“They wanted people basically to give them a blank check,” said Michelle Nelson, who works at Deary’s Whitehorse Cafe and supports splitting the district. “There’s just certain people that want it their way without compromise.”

At a school board meeting last week, trustee Judy Goodson suggested shutting down Troy High School, annexing Troy into the Moscow School District, and building a joint high school between the two towns.

Her motion to shut down the school died without being seconded.

“It’s kind of tough when you have one end of the district that has the votes and you’ve got the other end of the district that has the money,” said Goodson, who represents Deary, in the district’s property-tax rich east side. “The east side of the district is kind of tired of paying for shenanigans.”

Ott, though, said district patrons need to move beyond those arguments.

“I don’t want to get into a game of who’s responsible for this,” he said. “Right now, we’re gambling with people’s lives and I don’t like it.”