Appearance is Everything - Part 1

First impressions are everything....so how would one of our schools look, if all you saw was the outside of the school?  Today, I visited Walnut Hill Elementary here in Petersburg, VA, and took a few pictures.

If you click on the pictures, it will start an enlarged slide show.

Most of the following pictures speak for themselves, but I can tell you, though I was familiar with the appearance at a distance, even I was a bit sickened at just how poor the back area of the school looked, including the playgrounds used by hundreds of our children every school day.

One of the two playgrounds was installed when the school was built, over 40 years ago.  The merry-go-round is dangerously broken, along with several poles on the jungle gyms.  The ground was laden with broken glass, trash, rocks, pieces of the crumbling parking lot.  The grass out back of the school was very high and the construction grounds, leftover from the construction of the gym, left dangerous debris scattered about the school grounds.  Everything about the rear of the school was pretty bad.  It is hard for me to believe that even a pee-wee football team practices there.  There were tires, beer cans, water bottles, and debris everywhere.  The parking lot was in very, very poor shape.  Though much was paved, there actually was very little parking, and no real visitors parking, beside the street out front.

Almost all of the equipment was missing parts, had loose parts, or could be looked at as unsafe.  The tires that seem to make their way around the school yard have been here for at least a year.

How do you think kids feel, being sent out to play in and on trash?  Is this the best we can provide for our children?  Are not the upkeep of the grounds and safety of the grounds as important as just about any other part of running a school?

All the time the rest of this issues laid in the wide open, for all to see, funding was found for a gym, new sidewalk, and lighting for one almost unused sidewalk.  Why not improve these grounds or maybe part of them before installing an addition on very old school?

Appearance is important.  I can only imagine how many people, looking to purchase homes in our city that took one look at these school grounds and instantly decided to shop more expensive homes in Prince George or Colonial Heights.  This issue is not just a school problem, but a community and city wide major issue.  This is the issue of anyone who owns a house in Petersburg...not just if you have a child in school here.

Something must be done.

I will leave you with two last images.  They are both of the pathetic bird bath left as center focal point of the very front of Walnut Hill Elementary.  This bird bath has been broken and missing the basin for at least 2 years.  If no one cares about that, what else are they neglecting?  How many people did this one bird bath run away from Petersburg?

....Part 2 Coming Soon!