By Tom Dodge, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX –
Dear Mr. Dodge,
As a taxpayer in this town for thirty-five years you have a right to know the school property across the alleyway behind your house will be the site of a new band hall, an agriculture building, and a parking lot. The high school will be enlarged to accommodate three thousand students. Soon an armada of bulldozers, ground gobblers, and trucks the size of oil tankers will rumble onto the grassy area and dig, scoop, claw, scrape, and pound it until it is a vast wasteland of rock and debris. This construction will produce so much noise that it will turn your once-tranquil back yard into a torture compound. So much dust will settle on your car that you will long for the good old days when the fallout from TXI was all you had to worry about.
If it's any consolation, the construction of the new gymnasium and football stadium will not be built virtually in your backyard.
Thanks for the money.
This is a letter that the eight of us whose property adjoins the construction site never received. We didn't receive it because no one at the school wrote it. Such a notice would have been in order, I think. I just woke up one morning to see the enormous vehicles moving in. After two weeks now the grassy field where I jogged for thirty years, where duffers practiced their golf shots, and diaper-league football boys waddled about and tumbled into one another to please their dads - looks like it has been hit by a bunker buster bomb.
The proposal failed the first time but passed last year on the second try after a furious campaign blitz only a little less pervasive than the one selling the Iraq War rationale. Were we right the first time? There will be lots of new buildings - but will the children learn more math and science?
Recently I reported on an encounter with a high school coach on school property regarding the poor bathroom etiquette of my dog Tipper. The coach warned me that Midlothian was not a small country town anymore, that leash laws and pooper-scoopers were a new reality. Midlothian is becoming the new Plano. I accept that. But my neighbors are fuming about the new reality behind their houses and I would be too if I thought it would turn back time to 1970.
I'm not saying that urban overflow is not bothersome to me and to most people my age, but it isn't new and it isn't unique. The Indians of Virginia and Massachusetts were its first victims in this country. The entire westward expansion, I think, was the result of old-timers moving ever onward to put some space between themselves and the unrelenting influxers.
Soon our school enrollment will be increasing at the rate of six to eight hundred little influxers per year. Therefore we must have a new fourteen-million dollar football stadium. I think that public schools exist so we can have football.
Well, I don't care about football. I care about science and math and the arts. The bond campaign package states its goal clearly, and it has nothing to do with science and math and the arts. "Schools," it says, "should reflect the beliefs and values of the community they serve."
Oh really? I guess this explains why this country is nineteenth in the world in education, just behind Latvia.
Tom Dodge is a writer from Midlothian. If you have opinions or rebuttals about this commentary, call (214) 740-9338 or email us.