The Cape Henlopen School Board from left to right: Selby, Brittingham, Stone, Wray, Redden, Conlon. Not pictured: Coveleski, Prettyman.

At the Cape Henlopen School Board meeting at Mariner Middle School, it was Milton Elementary School once again topping the “Citizens’ Participation for Improvement” part of the agenda. In fact, three parents spoke that night and all three have kids at MES.

Milton Elementary School parent Sharon Davis.

Sharon Davis was there that night to address the issue of the bricks on the school’s new addition. As an MES parent myself, I’d heard rumors about a problem with the color of the exterior bricks on the addition. The school was built in the 1930s to serve as a middle school, and the original structure was red brick while the addition was white brick.

Thursday morning at my favorite little spot for coffee in downtown Milton, I asked a Miltonian “in the know,” and a woman who works at the Town Hall if the rumors were true. The answer was “no.” Neither of them had heard of any complaints about the color of the bricks on the school’s addition.

Cape School Board members Camilla Conlon and Noble Prettyman.

But alas, the rumors were apparently true, and from what I understand it was School Board member and Milton resident, Noble Prettyman, who raised the brick issue.

Is it important? Well, this is the deal…if you’ve ever built a house you know the monetary horrors of the “change order.” Changing the bricks on the school would be a “change order” since the white bricks were agreed on, (we’ll get to that later). So it’ll cost money and the District is already in the red and increasing class size to balance their ballooning budget. (All of those links will take you to stories about MES parents fighting larger class sizes at the school and complaining about wasteful spending by the Board). Parent Sharon Davis explains where the issue of “brick color” falls on the Parental Importance Scale in her presentation to the Board.

Mrs. Davis also addressed concerns about delaying the use of the addition while the new bricks are being installed. The smallest children in the school have to put on and take off jackets and navigate through construction, maybe 10 times a day, to get to the main building according to Davis. She also calculated this out to be an hour or more of time that could be used to do things like learning stuff.

The Board seemed to understand. Dr. Stone assured the crowd that if the bricks were changed, it would happen when school was out.

And here is the much awaited answer to the question, “Why in the world did they use white bricks on an otherwise red brick school anyway?” OK, this is what I’ve been told…Rehoboth Elementary School and MES were both slated for additions. They made one big order of bricks. Rehoboth’s addition looks pretty good and isn’t getting complaints.

Sharon Davis makes her entire case to the Cape Henlopen School Board in this clip. And yes, pictures of MES and the addititon to follow…you’ve gotta have pictures….

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Beaches, Cape Henlopen School District, Children, Delaware, Education, Local Politics, Milton, Pictures, Rehoboth Beach, Sussex County, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.