Every time an appliance breaks, my grandfather says, “They just don’t build things to last anymore.”
How right he is.
In this age of plastic and cheap labor, it seems all industries care about is how much of a product they can produce, not the quality of that product. The United States feeds into this ideology. Who cares if the microwave that was manufactured in China and bought at Wal-Mart breaks? Why bother getting it repaired when you can just buy another one? Are there any repairmen left anymore?
Just ask anyone at my alma mater, Baton Rouge Magnet High School. Once one of the most beautiful facilities in the East Baton Rouge Parish School System, the school has suffered from neglect and poor maintenance in the past few decades, like the majority of public schools in Baton Rouge. The EBR School Board has blamed the building’s decay on the construction method used to erect the main building in 1921. The bricks were not connected to the main walls of the school, causing “moisture intrusion” when air conditioning was installed in 1972, according to The Advocate.
The problem with this excuse is, while valid, it doesn’t explain the other signs of major neglect and incompetence – courtesy of the School Board – vividly visible inside the school. A coach at BRMHS showed me and other recent visitors a huge hole in the gymnasium floor where the roof has been allowed to leak. According to our tour guide, when the maintenance crew for the school board came out to “fix” the leak, they used duct tape to cover the hole in the roof. I know duct tape can do wonders, but I’m pretty sure it can’t fix a roof.
The school board wants to tear down the entire school and rebuild it somewhere else for $3 million more than it would cost to restore and renovate the current facility, according to WAFB.
Not only is this not cost effective, but it is not doing justice to the children who attend the public schools in Baton Rouge. For years, people in this parish have been avoiding problems rather than fixing them. Instead of adapting to desegregation and supporting the public schools by sending their children to school there and approving taxes for the schools, the majority of the privileged began sending their children to private schools. With little support from the community, the public school system decayed to the point where even middle-class parents had to struggle to pay tuition at private schools to avoid the lack of education being provided in the majority of EBR public schools. Cities in the parish such as Zachary and Baker began pulling out of the school system and forming their own independent districts, sucking resources and diversity from EBR School System. This has led to an exodus of EBR students and crowded school districts in Ascension and Livingston parishes. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of East Baton Rouge Parish has only increased by 3.9 percent in the past six years, while the populations of Ascension and Livingston parishes have increased by 27 percent and 25 percent respectively.
Don’t people realize all they are doing is bringing the problem elsewhere?
The problem is not the ineptitude of the public school system in Baton Rouge. The problem is the unwillingness of the people of the metro Baton Rouge area to confront the issues that plague not just our school system, but our entire area and fix them. Instead, most people prefer to be passive-aggressive. Is this kind of thinking really productive? Where will people run to when problems begin to mount in Ascension and Livingston, as they inevitably will? We cannot complain about the crime and poverty rates in Baton Rouge if we are unwilling to offer the underprivileged of the city a decent education. For many, a decent education is the first step to a better life.
But in this throwaway mentality of consumerism that we employ in today’s society, there is no value in maintaining and restoring what is old. If something isn’t working anymore, don’t bother fixing it when you can waste more resources building something new. In 30 years or less, you’ll have to replace the “new” item or building again because of the same problems – neglect and disrepair. Instead of being accountable for their actions, people prefer to destroy the evidence of their ineptitude and build something new.
We are so quick in today’s world to build a disposable life. This attitude teaches future generations to not make use of your resources or do the best job you can. If the school board succeeds, they are robbing Baton Rouge of a valuable link to the city’s past while teaching students that if you fail to do your job, you can always build another facility to continue the cycle of neglect. This cycle of ineffectiveness must not be permitted to continue. If we allow it to, we will leave behind an awful legacy of waste and destruction.
—–Contact Laura Bratcher at [email protected]