To the editor:
I voted by absentee ballot over two weeks ago to approve the November 4 ballot proposal to fund the construction of a new building for Monument Mountain Regional High School (MMRHS) in Great Barrington.
I tutored students in that school frequently for 10 years through June 2005. After taking a recent tour of the building, studying the extensive proposed plans, and attending two question-and-answer presentations about them, it seems clear to me that there is no other current viable political or economic choice on this matter.
Former MMRHS Principal and longtime Monument math teacher Kristina Farina recently wrote that “patchwork investments cannot fix the core problems of a 50-year-old facility.” I agree. Such efforts would not be able to correct the many fundamental design flaws in the current MMRHS building, like its severe lack of natural daylight.
Project architect Donna DiNisco says that the usable lifetime of the new building would be at least 50 years.
As a beneficiary of schooling in taxpayer-funded buildings from first grade through two years of graduate school, I think we have an intergenerational obligation to pay this benefit forward to support the schooling of the next two generations of our high school students. But constructing a new building will not alone fulfill our intergenerational public obligations to those students.
Today’s fifth graders will enter ninth grade in the new building in September 2029 if the plan is approved on November 4. Within their expected lifetimes, they and their successors are very likely to experience turbulent political, social, and economic conditions that will make the Great Depression of the 1930s seem like a tea party by comparison.
No matter what the condition of our school buildings becomes over the next 50 years, it is unlikely that the basic features of the 150-year-old system of compulsory elementary and high school education that they are designed to house and to which our society has become accustomed, will be sustainable operationally, economically, and politically for the next 50 years.
A significant body of scholarly literature strongly indicates that our nation (along with many others) is headed for catastrophic economic and ecological collapse during this century.
Our corporate news media do an excellent job of hiding the outlines of this predictable phenomenon. Our national economy has become an increasingly fragile house of cards, cumulatively weakened by our misguided, massive, and economically destructive public investment in war and preparation for war for more than my 77 years, and by the ecologically profligate degradation of the resource base on which all economic activity ultimately depends.
It is not possible to predict with precision when this collapse will occur, nor whether it will occur suddenly or gradually. But that it will begin to strongly restrict the choices of today’s fifth graders and their children well before the former reach their 70s seems inevitable.
One of the likely features of economic collapse will be fitful and then increasingly frequent electrical power outages. Rolling power brownouts and blackouts would alone make the new school and many other public buildings intermittently unusable, well before they would need structural replacement.
In 2013 and 2014, the Berkshire Hills Regional School District (BHRSD) commissioned a detailed architectural plan for an extensive renovation of and addition to the high school building and was assured a substantial state contribution to their projected cost.
When I wrote and spoke in 2013 to the BHRSD School Committee and their then-architect Alex Pitkin about sustainability concerns related to large capital investments in new or renovated school buildings, Mr. Pitkin replied, on March 2, 2013 (in part):
I have read and seen much on the topics you describe and believe that as a society we must broadly be looking for solutions to solve the most pressing issues of our time [:] energy consumption and climate change. As professionals it is our obligation to focus on solving the very specific problems for which we are hired as well as being responsive to the requirements of jurisdictions having oversight and authority for the project (State and Federal laws, codes, MSBA guidelines, etc.).
Our profession trends toward optimism and the sense of making the world a better, healthier place. Improving the physical conditions of the buildings in which we entrust our most vulnerable citizens (children and students) seems to me to be one of the best ways of addressing the pressing needs of our future. Tackling this serious work now, without delay, is a positive response to your concerns. *** I do not dispute the facts or points of view [that I had described for him in detail, from the literature cited above], but relative to your comments feel that the real change required is political and policy driven due to the broad and far-ranging changes required.
On May 9, 2013, I wrote to the School Committee:
I appreciated Alex Pitkin’s response… I think he is basically saying in it:
1) A detailed assessment of the sustainability of a 40 year investment in the present site is outside the scope of both his charge from the School Committee, and of the professional competence of a school architect.
2) He remains optimistic about our society’s ability to respond to the resource and planning issues raised in my February 12 letter.
3) The best contribution he can make toward the sustainability of BHRSD’s physical arrangements for its high school students is to give us the best and most energy efficient renovation / addition plan that we can afford.
4) The policy concerns that directly touch my central questions … require ‘broader research and study.’
Yes, we owe it to the next two generations of district students to vote “Yes” on November 4.
We also owe it to them to press our elected officials at all levels, our planning authorities, and our mainstream corporate journalists to work together to enable the broader research and study of sustainability issues that Mr. Pitkin advocated in 2013.
John Breasted
Great Barrington
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