To the editor:
Before us at Town Meeting will be a warrant article to approve funds to study costs associated with fixing our town’s school buildings. The school building’s needs have been professionally studied for 12 years, yet it’s said at meetings that people may not believe that the needs are real. On paper the school building’s needs may seem distant, debatable, and unrelated to learning. As a parent, however, I consistently see how the building’s needs are affecting children and how they’re related to learning, health and safety.
Our daughter’s classroom has been a stagnant 76 to 78 degrees this winter. She’s been telling us that it’s too hot, that it makes her feel sick and dizzy and that she can’t think. Maintenance sounds like an easy fix, but this classroom is stuck in a “difficult to fix” zone of the outdated Univent heating system. The teacher has had to open the windows and door this winter to provide intermittent relief. In December parents were notified that a Univent motor burned out and filled a second grade classroom with smoke, causing the school to be evacuated. While there was no fire, a situation like this speaks to the importance of having a fire suppression system in the schools, yet we have none.
In the spring, fans will again be brought into classrooms to compensate for the building’s decreased ventilation rates and lack of dehumidification. Opening the windows may sound like an easy fix to increase air flow, but what happens to the children with asthma and allergies that are exacerbated by outdoor pollen, and what happens to the attention and learning of the children who are distracted by the noise from ongoing recess? Sometimes it’s not possible to open the windows.
When this is your child’s everyday learning environment, it becomes clear quickly that the building is making the act of learning more difficult than it needs to be. Support of this warrant article will help further identify costs so we can move beyond studying the problems and get to fixing the problems. The town’s school buildings are telling us a story and it’s my hope that we will both listen and respond with urgency, ensuring the health and safety of children and the delivery of education in this town for generations to come.
Sincerely,
Betsey Yeats
35 Round Hill Road
Letters to the editor must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Letters must be about a Lincoln-specific topic. Letters containing personal attacks, errors of fact or other inappropriate material will not be published. Letters may be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor.