Monday, March 16, 2009

At least nobody got hurt. This time, anyway.

From AZCentral.com -
More than 700 students in Tempe spent an extra day on spring break after a roof collapse and flooding at C.I. Waggoner Elementary forced officials to close the school today while they assessed the damage.
Fortunately, the roof collapsed before school started and no students or staff were injured.

However, given the lege's unceasing drive to undermine public schools (as illustrated by the lege's suspension of the School Facilities Board's Building Renewal Fund in last year's budget and proposed for next year's budget by Russell Pearce and John Kavanagh, and the defeat of a move during last year's session of the lege to help out with Corona del Sol HS' air quality problems), it's just a matter of time.

Sacrificing long-term infrastructure maintenance, be it of schools, dams, bridges, or roads (or any of a hundred other examples), for a short-term political benefit or to appease a nihilist ideology, carries with it foolishly grave risks.

2 comments:

Thane Eichenauer said...

I would like to point out that if the folks that run the schools are already failing to maintain safe schools (or dams or bridges) then they probably need to look to reducing spending in other areas.
Pardon my stock seeming answer but I see rather few private organizations who have roofs collapse quite as often as schools (though perhaps I just don't read enough about roof collapses to have a fair evaluation).

Craig said...

I would like to point out that under AZ's system, new school building and maintenance projects for existing schools are under legislative control through the School Facilities Board.

As for the seemingly high number of school roof collapses vs. private roof collapses, I used Google News to search for the phrase "roof collapse" in the news for the last month.

There were 61 separate occurences of the phrase during the last month; 8 were school-related.

And of those 8, 6 had to do with yesterday's collapse in Tempe.

It's anecdotal evidence, but it seems that public school roofs don't collapse at a greater rate than those in private buildings.