Parents of Lake Tahoe school children are fighting the closure of Kingsbury Middle School tooth and nail.
Normally, we're very supportive of regular folks who feel they're being run over by a government bureaucracy. We believe the government should be responsive to the people, not the other way around.
There are very good reasons to keep Kingsbury over Zephyr Cove. Kingsbury is newer and it has less detectable poison gas rising up from the foundations.
Radon is a byproduct of decomposing granite and is a huge health issue at Lake Tahoe. One estimate is that two-thirds of the homes in Zephyr Cove have radon levels above the EPA standard. If we were to shut down every structure in Zephyr Cove that had a high reading for radon, we wouldn't need either the elementary or the middle school.
Closing a school is something Douglas County hasn't done in a long time and it affects more than the people that school serves. The taxes that built both schools came from people all over the county, whether they had children in school or not. School trustees have a duty to every taxpayer in this county to make the right choice.
Improvements to Kingsbury will cost half what they will to Zephyr Cove, but selling Kingsbury will raise nearly twice what selling Zephyr Cove will.
It is going to be very difficult for an upcoming school bond to pass, but it will be a lot harder if the school district gave away $4 million because they kept Kingsbury and sold off Zephyr Cove. And we get the feeling that should Zephyr Cove be up for closure, the faces would change but the fight would be the same.
