Old Buildings Uniquely Valuable

I love San Angelo more than those other cities because we understand the value of a dollar—for ourselves and for our children—among many other reasons.

The statement “Bonds are the only way to renovate or construct” is simply false. When San Angelo voters rejected a bond to build San Angelo Stadium, the school board built it anyway—without a bond.

Past fiscal irresponsibility is a compelling reason not to approve more money for a school board that has kicked the can down the road on maintenance. Has any school building been condemned or declared unsafe? If not, the crisis seems more manufactured than real.

There’s something uniquely valuable about students learning in century-old buildings—structures with character and history, unlike the modern, sterile facilities built to fall apart in 30 years. I went to 8th grade in the same building my mother attended during World War II… and I still gradutated college!

Thorne Campbell

This Email to the Editor was originally published as a comment to Survey Shows San Angelo Voters Stingy

Reply to Thorne Campbell

You say my statement that bonds are the only way to renovate, or construct is “simply false.”

And yet the only exception you can find to that statement is the construction of San Angelo Stadium.

You make it sound like construction and renovation projects are just happening left-and-right around town in the absence of bonds for years now, even. 

I see absolutely no evidence to support that.

The $300,000 bond proposal for funds to build a new stadium was called by San Angelo College — not by San Angelo ISD.

Along with the stadium, there also was a $300,000 proposal to build an agricultural-science building, and a proposition that would raise the M&O tax rate for the college by as much as 15-cents.

On April 10, 1954, voters approved the new science building, and a 15-cent tax-rate increase for the school, but said “no” to the stadium.

The vote was 1,512 against and 1,386 in favor.

In June of that year, looking at the need for at least $50,000 worth of repairs at the old Bobcat Stadium, San Angelo ISD’s board started talks about building something new.

As it happened, by October of that year, the San Angelo School Board declared it would build a new football stadium if (1) half the money was collected by public subscription and if (2) the school district received the payout on an old claim of $223,289 from the Federal Government, that had been submitted during a building program from a few years before.

School trustees reasoned that the collection of $100,000 would be “interpreted as public approval of a new stadium.”

This is similar to how COVID money helped accomplish the major renovations just completed at McGill Elementary, for instance, but it most certainly did not come from pinching pennies on paper and pencils.

In places where they have schools that are hundreds of years old, the buildings themselves were designed to last for hundreds of years. School buildings in America are, for the most part, not designed for the long-term.

The ward elementary schools of 1908 and 1909 were most likely designed to last about 50 years, because that was the industry design standard in America for most public schools.

My grandmother went to primary school in a one-room shack in Ismay, Montana in 1928. There is no part of me that thinks it would be cute or nostalgic for any child to attend school in those conditions today.

— Matthew McDaniel