South San Francisco, CA July 20, 2016 Submitted by a SSF Resident
The Citizens Board Oversight Committee and members of the public are scheduled to do a walk through of Parkway Middle School and Buri Buri tomorrow night, Thursday July 21st, at 5:30 starting in the SSFUSD Board Room.
A tour of the schools will follow.
Parkway Heights Middle school is the only middle school on this side of town. It’s half finished conditions, now with no chance of new buildings to replace the remaining old ones (oldest middle school in the district folks), needs attention. Parkway is just as bad as Buri and needs a full shot of light shown on it. All of it. Attention to the gaping holes and trenches, chipped away blacktop surfaces left for a later date, pipes covered in duct tape for temp repair since the buildings were to be torn down. ADA safety issues, fences that fall down, plumbing that sort of works, weeds growing in the length that any homeowner would be fined. A tour of the field conditions needs to be included. UNUSABLE and makes the school appeared to be abandoned. Perhaps it has been? Civil rights of students to receive equitable conditions throughout the district, one middle school to the next, are to be questioned. It’s worse now than when they started. This school was slated to have its renaissance but has yet to emerge from the Dark Age. Roughly 600 students this school serves, one-third of the population. Its current conditions are blasphemous. Concerned citizens need to speak up now or it’ll stay like this until a lawsuit happens. Seriously, the place looks abandoned.
Unfortunately I am having difficulty walking due to hip problems, or I would be there front and center. I am very concerned about the conditions at Buri Buri Elementary: The partially-draped chain link fences, giving us peeks of the disaster behind; The weeds; the mountains and ditches where children should have a play area; The classrooms that look like a juvenile detention center; The helter-skelter arrangement of buildings that could easily hide child molesters; The ugly paint job; The scraggly trees; On and on.
If I were only younger, I’d be organizing a cleanup. This is OUR NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOL! How could we let this happen? How can we let this keep happening?
Does this Citizens Board Oversight Committee have any authority to do anything?