School architect had built a school

I’m looking at the long list of schools designed by Upland Design Group architects, the folks who designed the soon-to-open Centertown School.

The list is 51 names long, most involving multi-million dollar projects, with buildings dating back to 1979. They have a long track record and were entrusted to our $7.3 million building project to replace a dilapidated old school. Based on my first tour of the building during open house Sunday, the school looks to be the best facility in the county where any kid would be proud to attend school.

It appears someone got it right when they decided to move ahead with the Centertown project, opting to go with a proven producer instead of hiring some first-time group which had never built a school. After all, who in the world would trust a builder who had never designed such a building to direct a $7 million project? Oh, wait ‘ we did.

Yes, the same county which had the foresight to hire a company which specialized in building schools to do our Centertown project was the exact same county which decided to have our jail built by someone who had never built a jail. This is the same jail where a pair of teen-age inmates kicked out a window and bars, rappelling down bed sheets and pushing aside razor wire before disappearing into the night. And no, they weren’t rocket scientists seeing as they were both found the next day in exactly the places lawmen figured they’d hide.

I’ve heard numerous complaints from folks who have knowledge of the jail, telling me even before the place opened about issues and problems which have nagged the facility. Now we have folks slipping out windows and into the exercise yard at the jail to take delivery of contraband like they’re meeting the Miller Light truck to get inventory for a market. How in the world do you have a jail where a couple of teens can kick out the jail bars?

Let me first tell you about one of my favorite shows, ‘Mythbusters,’ which a few months back was testing old west myths, specifically the old west jail break. What they did is hastily build a small wooden jail and put metal bars in the window. Then they went about trying to pull the bars out using horses like you see in cowboy films. They tried every which way to pull those bars out, yet all failed until they used a big bulldozer and it ended up tearing up the whole jail before the bars came out.

So, with that said, my question is how a couple of teen-agers can kick out bars in a jail which was supposedly designed so guards could see everything that goes on? I don’t know about you, but I’d like some of my money back. Building a jail where inmates can’t be held is like building library where you can’t read books. It’s pretty well useless, especially if, like one county leader said of our jail, it becomes a ‘money pit’ for constant fixes.

If you hire someone who has never built a jail to build a jail, that’s what you get. I don’t care if these folks are known for building the greatest shopping malls in the world. If they hadn’t built a jail, then we were foolhardy for allowing ourselves to become guinea pigs. Hey, even as nice as Centertown School is, there’s no way I’d hire its builders to build a jail unless they could show me several past jails they’d built.

What we’ve done is saved money on the front end only to pay a lot more on the back end. There were warnings about what would happen, many of them voiced in this newspaper, but our elected officials railroaded it through hoping to save a buck. While their financial tenacity may be applaudable, their lack of foresight will drain our wallets for the foreseeable future, that is if the escapees don’t clean us out first.

Duane Sherrill is a reporter for the Standard. He can be reached at 473-2191 or by e-mail at [email protected].