Letter: Proposed facilities plan puts New Haven School on back burner — again

Dear Editor,

I feel like I have written this before, but here we are again, discussing New Haven School’s lack of attention from the Nelson County School district.

The Nelson County Schools Local Planning Committee (LPC) began their meeting and assessment process to review previous facilities plans, the state of current buildings in the district and to formulate new plans for maintaining and updating or, if needed, building of new structures.

It is my understanding that under Nelson County’s current Facilities Plan, New Haven is slated to receive a new school building. However, in the recent LPC meeting held at Boston School on Wednesday, Nov. 2, new models for facilities plans show there would be no new building for New Haven under any of the new facilities plan models. In fact, there would be no major renovations to the oldest building in the district until 2030 under the only model that doesn’t include merging the middle schools into the high schools.

The new facilities plan makes it appear there are no other options to consider. The best they can come up with is that with the Community Campus option, it will mean nine more years of New Haven kids getting put on the back burner. What is another decade added to the three we have already waited? At this rate we can put the school building on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s eligible now based on its age, but I digress.

You must ask yourself if the district’s new facilities models are really about opportunity for all and who exactly will benefit from the new facilities models produced by the district. Throwing around the word “opportunities” doesn’t speak them into existence. In nine years, most people who have kids in New Haven School won’t have to be worried about whether the New Haven School saga continues. The middle schoolers will be pulled out of New Haven and bused to Bardstown, but the same issues with “opportunity” will be there for a whole new batch of New Haven kids for the same reasons the school lacks opportunity now: resources and size.

I predict making the school even smaller will compound the funding and resource issues it faces already, not fix them. We can do better than this.

Sincerely,

Vanessa Hurst
New Haven

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