Down River 4/29

By John Lipez

The Right First Step:

Central Mountain High School has something of a longstanding problem relative to its spring sport facilities. The Keystone Central school board’s curricular/co-curricular committee as much as acknowledged that at its meeting last week when it gave informal approval to a district plan to get a professional evaluation of the current set-up spread over two school campuses and several municipalities.

As a backgrounder, if you’ve followed the school district over the last half century or so, give or take a decade or two, you know that all too often decisions have been made on the cheap and/or on the fly. It took about 25 years of the last half century to finally get five (out of nine) school board votes to proceed with a consolidation of schools in the southern end of the geographically far-flung district.

In retrospect, the school board at the time, in order to get the five votes to proceed with what eventually became Central Mountain High School, exercised frugality to a fault. While it was the correct decision to find a site outside of Lock Haven for the new school, the plot selected proved from the get-go to be too small. And then pieces were added piecemeal: the football stadium without a track; a fairly massive CTC addition which was cut back fairly quickly, only to be given new life in recent years (that’s a good thing). Most recently the district allowed the wooded acreage beyond the football stadium to be excavated for its fill to assist First Quality in its expansion in Castanea Township.

But now the new leadership team in the school district is not convinced that on-campus site, up the narrow, winding Keystone Central Drive is a good long term solution for a ball field.

Yes, the district a quarter century ago should have searched for a larger plot for its consolidated high school. Most school districts in this area have done this. Prime example number one would be right in the Keystone Central School District. Movers and shakers in western Clinton County better than half a century ago, faced with an outdated high school facility along the river in Renovo, moved to a massive new plot in Farwell, out of the flood plain and room for outdoor facilities galore (more on that in a few paragraphs). Jersey Shore’s high school complex is on the outskirts of that borough; Williamsport’s high on a hill away from the town; Bellefonte on the perimeter of the Centre County county seat.

As a result of this lack of foresight from the school district back in the 1990s, here is what we have: a varsity baseball field for games and practices in Mill Hall borough, a mile or two from the high school. A jayvee field all the way up in Beech Creek (it costs the district $4,400 annually to transport the jayvees there). And those ball fields are barely adequate; Superintendent Jacquelyn Martin said last week it would cost a couple hundred thousand dollars to bring the varsity field at Mill Hall Community Park up to speed, but the field is in the flood plain and is owned by the borough, not the district.

At the Central Mountain Middle School we find a practice football field used for varsity and junior high track, a track and field setup in need of considerable improvement.

So the current layout for spring sports is far from ideal, off campus. But the current administration is concerned there does not appear to be enough acreage at Central Mountain High School to move these sports there. That’s why they are advocating for the hiring of an outside consultant to look at the preliminary multiple options the administration has developed.

At this point, the superintendent said, the most viable option appears to be a redesign of the athletic complex at the middle school, with the possibility of locating two baseball (varsity and jayvee) fields there. We would recall there was some softball played at a mostly vacant plot of land at the complex’s southwest corner, but if memory serves, there was an issue with groundwater there.

The board committee members generally agreed that outside, professional help should be brought in. In a perfect world, the district would be able to fit everything onto the high school campus but, not to belabor the point, the board at the time of the school consolidation seemed more concerned about combining the schools than the details/scope of the new school/campus.

Let’s see where this goes. There is no question that new superintendent Martin and her team are moving forward to provide the district “the best fields at the best price.” Progress is being made on the fields of play front, as well as in the academic arena. (Where was she a quarter century ago when we all needed her?).

There were a couple other revelations at that board committee meeting last week, these concerning the Bucktail High School complex and its fields.

The baseball field there is not properly sized. Home plate has to be moved up two feet and the distance from first to third base is two feet too long and the pitcher’s mound needs reconstructed. As for the Lady Buck softball field, the backstop does not meet PIAA regulations and will have to be relocated a bit. Bucktail Principal Mike Hall also told the committee that the girls’ locker-room at the high school needs some work and is not ADA compliant.

So there you go. The fields of play across the vast Keystone Central complex need some work, neglected over the years for a variety of reasons.

But the new regime is tackling the problems in a timely manner. Keystone’s kids do deserve “the best fields at the best price” and the school district is in the process of making that happen.