By Barry D. Mills, Stevensville
What is a school: brick & mortar or heart & soul?
It might be easy to confuse the condition of school facilities with the health of the school itself. If the fix were a new school facilities, then mansions would be the fix to cure divorces. What can be seen from across Park Avenue, may be misleading.
In the case of Stevensville, the sound of the deferred maintenance is a survey of the health of the heart and soul dimension of the school.
What is the sound of the status of the school with regard to past maintenance?
…the steady drip, drip, drip of the unanswered question.
…the slow degradation of trust when agreeing-to-disagree leaves issues to fester unresolved.
…the sound of silence when administrative discretion, vis., no recourse, no explanation, is the justification for a controversial decision.
…the creaking despair when the red flag of warning flutters to tatters and finally blows away in the wind.
…the hollow sound of a voice unanswered in an empty hall.
…the whistling sound of disengagement when staff, teachers, students, parents, the public are ignored, dismissed, diminished.
…the drafty breeze of “standby-our-man” as the thin insulation against the cold of indifference,
…the freezing chill of apathy from a disaffected public.
The bumper sticker in front of the Mountain Bell office in the waning days of the now extinct Ma Bells seems apropos: “We don’t care, because we don’t have to.”
Differed maintenance doesn’t happen all at once, it happens daily, one day at a time, one person at a time.
Easy to dismiss, easy to ignore, it’s just one person, one issue, at a time, no discernable pattern.
A bond issue can fix the brick and mortar, but treating everyone (especially those which whom we disagree, or those who feel excluded) as family, friends and neighbors is the cement that binds, builds and heals the heart and soul of a school.