EV school board needs a better plan

The East Valley School Board and the superintendent plan to take three of our public schools out of use for our students.

• They plan to tear down Mountain View Middle School. Take a drive out to Mountain View School site. It sits on beautiful grounds, out in the fresh air and open spaces. The Otis Orchards area has the most potential for future growth and development of any area in the district.

• They plan on turning East Valley Middle School into an administration/maintenance office.

This is a school and serves the community much better for our students’ use as it was planned. The administration and the maintenance shop have perfectly adequate buildings for their use.

• They plan to use Skyview Elementary only for Continuous Curriculum School (CCS).

This is a choice school. The regular school students will be bused out of their neighborhood. The administration is advertising for out-of-district students. Is this what we intend our tax dollars to be used for? Wouldn’t it better serve our students to leave them in their neighborhood school and send CCS elsewhere; or better yet, maybe it’s time to discontinue CCS and send those students back to their neighborhood schools. That would even out enrollments at our public schools.

A recent article in the Valley Voice used CCS as an example of how K-8 works. They cited schools in Cleveland, New York, etc. This is East Valley, still a very rural school. We have relatively small K-5 schools, middle, and high schools. Why would we want to crowd our students into very large PK-8 schools? We have enjoyed our K-5 or K-6 schools with a smaller enrollments for many years. We don’t need to house our students in large PK-8 schools.

The East Valley superintendent and school board need to come up with a better plan!

Joan Tupper

Spokane