Jubilation all around

To celebrate the opening of the new Lake Roosevelt School, we’ve dedicated a lot of space throughout the paper this week to that coverage. You’ll find photographs on most pages of the progress inside the building and out, and businesses have taken out advertisements in support of this truly great moment for our community.

That’s something sensed by everyone, including those directly involved in the project itself, whether bending steel, or sweeping up.

“We’re changing lives here,” one proud worker said to a Star photographer outside the school last month.

The community has expressed that feeling to the workers, as well. “The people are happy,” one man said as he helped to lay down asphalt last Friday. He said he’d been stopped in the grocery store, where people told him, “Thank you, thank you.”

Along with the emotion, a few interesting facts should be embraced and remembered about the achievement, facts that may not be commonly realized:

The federal Department of Interior did not pay for any part of the construction of the new school. You may encounter friends from other towns who will assume it did, this being a community built around federal projects.

This is almost certainly the only public school built in modern times in the state of Washington to be constructed without one penny of debt placed on the community. Construction of public schools is financed with a mixture of state funds and local match paid by local property tax. But the lack of enough private property value, due to federal ownership, has kept local students in dilapidated schools for generations. And yet, we have no mortgage to pay. Which leads us to the third fact:

None of it would be possible without the leadership of the state senator from Wenatchee, who represents the 12th Legislative District, Sen. Linda Evans Parlette. It was she who laid the financial footwork early on to get us enough money to plan the facility and more. Then, with the facility plans in hand, and the push to pass jobs bills a hot topic in Olympia, this “shovel-ready” project was ripe for funding, with the strategic help of Sen. Parlette. Without her leadership, it would not have happened.

With the school set to open to students next Monday and for an open house to the community on Friday, please note that most of the photos in this issue were taken within the last two weeks. Many don’t show a facility that looks like it is about to open, although much of the work left was of a kind that goes quickly, while holding up the big effort of actually moving furniture in. Hence, the place has looked like the mess you’d expect if you were moving furniture into your new house before the contractors were done building it.

It will be fun to see how much is left to do on Friday, but whatever is left will be trivial compared to the jubilation that should arise from seeing this beautiful, state-of-the-art facility.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher