Editor, The Commercial: Oh, Great! Now the overlords who blitzkrieged our school district, then destroyed the one in Dollarway, want to shut down Pine Bluff High School and move it to the east end of town so they can pimp [rent] out students with no need to bus them.
Granted, some of the buildings may be showing their age; they were built in the 1970s, half a century ago, to replace much older red-brick buildings. They were built in the same places as their predecessors, though, to maintain a central location.
Housing patterns may have changed since, but there hasn’t been a surge in occupancy in the east end!! Rather, the population and businesses have shifted west and south, but geographically the school’s central location still makes better sense.
To make matters worse, the overlords want us to pay for all that, on top of school taxes they spend with no regard for our opinions or desires, and don’t bother mentioning a public vote. If it’s such a grand idea, why don’t they pay for it, and we can stop paying that school tax, since we have no say in how our money is spent.
Am I incensed? Indeed I am, and with good reason. The state Board of Education assumed control of two Pine Bluff school districts on the pretense of improving the education of our students and raising their grades. We have no proof that it has done anything of the sort, though, nor does it seem inclined to try to show any such improvement. Rather, it wants to implement whatever policies it sees fit, with little or no public input beyond perhaps a few selected smarmy acolytes.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
The state needs to realize that it is doing an injustice to the good people of Jefferson County, while not helping the students. It should make an effort to better the system it invaded, or step back, take stock of what it has done, and admit it maybe is no better than what it replaced, people who at least had to answer to voters.
Or maybe we could just let them relocate the school, subsume our moral values, and change the name of the campus and mascot from the Pine Bluff High School Zebras to the Unified Demoralized Brown-Nosers.
D.H. RIDGWAY, PINE BLUFF