OUR VIEW: Regulations close old grade schools

Everyone wants an elementary school around the corner, so kids can walk to school. Unfortunately, nearby schools are becoming scarcer by the day for people who live in historic villages or older, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods of cities. Take, for example, Monument’s Grace Best Elementary School. It will close after the school year ends, and government regulation is part of the reason. The plight of Grace Best is typical.

The Lewis-Palmer School District, like most districts, finds itself in a recessionary financial crisis. To cut costs, the school board recently considered four options this month that each involve making more use of fewer attendance facilities. All four options included the following phrase: “Close Grace Best Elementary School and...”

Something had to close, after all, and it made sense to close Grace Best. It’s a beloved, high achieving school in the center of the Tri-Lakes Region, which is home to some 20,000 residents. But it’s also one of the district’s older facilities, which means it’s an asbestos liability. Desired renovations would likely force removal of asbestos because of federal regulations. Asbestos removal is a highly regulated process that sometimes costs millions. It’s hard to fault the board, therefore, for choosing Grace Best.

A Google search of “school closed for asbestos” shows old, central schools in dense, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods have been closing all over the country because of asbestos removal that’s required with major renovations. Schools containing asbestos are the first to go when districts reduce attendance centers.

Grace Best is the public school in the center of Historic Monument — a humble village that’s the service and cultural hub of the suburban Tri-Lakes region. Historic Monument consists of neighborhoods densely populated, relative to surrounding subdivisions, in which residents can walk to local restaurants, coffee shops, art galleries, and stores.

The loss of older, central schools counters a constructive new trend of the past decade erroneously dubbed “new urbanism” — a return to density, and communities in which people walk to schools, churches, and businesses. The return to dense, pedestrian living began in the early 1980s and picked up steam throughout the last decade. A move away from suburban sprawl is great for people who want to spend less of their lives in cars, frustrated by traffic and parking challenges. It works for people who want to do business with friends and neighbors, and for parents who choose to spare their children hours on a school bus each week — time they could use learning and playing.

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New urbanism is merely a return to old urbanism, which resulted organically from the economic and cultural advantage of people living in close proximity to one another to facilitate the efficient exchange of services and goods. Suburban sprawl replaced old urbanism throughout much of the 20th Century. The trend toward sprawl had little to do with market forces, and much to do with progressive planning and zoning policies that forbade density.

Today, as people return to walk-around neighborhoods — in order to enjoy community living mostly free of traffic and cars — they’re losing local schools to a 25-year-old asbestos scare. They’re finding themselves busing or driving their children to newer schools in the suburbs.

It’s not good to breathe asbestos dust. Nobody wants that for children. Yet the federal government’s Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act of 1986 stands as one of the worst, most politically motivated overreactions of our time.

The law resulted from knowledge that asbestos mine workers, and others who had worked directly with asbestos for years, were dying from lung cancer caused by long-term exposure to high concentrations of airborne asbestos.

Solid asbestos panels inside the walls of buildings do not produce airborne asbestos. Science magazine blew the lid off that myth in 1990, reporting that asbestos fiber concentrations in buildings containing asbestos materials are comparable to levels detected in outdoor air, and often lower. Only removing asbestos causes high concentrations of airborne particles, meaning most schools would do better by simply covering asbestos in plastic, rather than removing it, during renovation projects.

With its excessive legislation, Congress created an industry of counterproductive lawsuits and asbestos removal projects. Mostly, Congress caused the closure of old neighborhood schools, which puts kids on buses and in cars for trips to faraway schools. — Wayne Laugesen, editorial page editor, for the editorial board. Friend Wayne on Facebook.

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