From Katie Lehto
Monroe
To the Editor:
A district with five schools should put up a new school every 20 years. This allows the debt to state at a consistent level while providing long-term planning for replacing aging facilities. Even at that pace, there will always be a certain percentage of Monroe students (10-30%) who will be attending an 80-100 year old building at any given time. In addition to the 20-year cycle, there will be maintenance and renovation projects for each building along the way; I don’t know of any building that can go 100 years without any substantial renovation.
Twenty years after the original high school (now the current middle school) went up in 1939, Monroe put the new high school in 1959. Just 9 years after that, in 1968, taxpayers opted again for Northside. Nine years later, in 1977, they paid for Abe, and 9 years after that, in 1986, they did it again with Parkside.
Parkside was the last time Monroe put up a new school. We are already nearly 20 years behind schedule. The decision not to build a new school because of an increase in taxes isn’t fair to previous generations. If we don’t build this school, we will soon have gone 40 years without building a single school, while one generation put up three in 30. You can debate the reasons why it may have been different back then, but it changes nothing about the financial burden they took on so that we can have what we have today.
It also isn’t fair to future generations to leave them playing catch-up. If we want Monroe to be the place that “Brings You Back,” we need to have infrastructure that can compete with other communities; this will never get less expensive. We want people to stay here, raise their kids here, and invest in our economy, because frankly, a community that can’t retain or recruit new residents dies.
We owe it to those before us that laid the groundwork for our beautiful community, and we owe it to those after us who will carry it on after we are gone. This is our legacy. It’s our turn. Vote Yes for Monroe on November 8.
