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Time for repairs at Mount Pleasant

By Staff | Apr 26, 2016

The Nashua Board of Education and the city’s Board of Aldermen frequently have to distinguish between those things that are truly necessary and those which are merely desirable.

That choice came into focus yet again recently when a group of parents and educators detailed ongoing physical plant problems within the 80-year-old Mount Pleasant Elementary School on Manchester Street.

City and school officials met Thursday to consider remedies to ongoing heating and ventilation issues at the school after parents and teachers talked to Board of Education members recently about problems at the school.

The picture they painted boils down to this: Do you prefer your learning environment sweltering hot or freezing cold?

"The heat in my classroom has been broken all winter. For safety, I have to keep my door closed, and it feels like I’m teaching in a freezer," teacher Johanna Marston said. "In addition, there are many of us who, when we do turn the heat on, the rattling is so loud that it’s a disruption."

One observer likened the sound to that of an idling car.

"In the summer months, it seasily registers 97 degrees on the second floor," said teacher Maura McIntyre.

It doesn’t even have to be summer for the upper rooms in the four-story building to heat up. Classrooms were unseasonably warm on a recent day in which the temperature outside was only in the 60s and 70s.

"The heater in the cafeteria has failed three times this year alone," said Danielle St. Hilaire, a PTO Board member for Mount Pleasant. But in the warmer months, the cafeteria tops 100 degrees.

As St. Hilaire pointed out, such classroom conditions likely have an effect on students.

"They’re trying to learn in this environment, and kids are literally laying on the floor, on their backpacks, with the lights off."

As if none of that were bad enough, the outdated plumbing system sometimes turns the school’s water brown, there are leaks, and windows have fallen out of their casings.

It’s all understandably frustrating for parents and teachers.

"(Mount Pleasant) needs attention," St. Hilaire said at a recent board meeting. "It deserves the same level of attention that all the other schools in Nashua have received. And we’re tired of being shunned."

The infuriating thing is that none of this is new.

Assistant Superintendent Jennifer Seusing said some of the problems have persisted since she taught at Mount Pleasant in the 1990s.

"I taught on the third floor, and the lack of air flow and the heat in the rooms – it was like listening to the same issues from all those years ago," Seusing said at a recent Board of Education meeting.

At a recent meeting of the city’s Finance and Operations Committee, school district officials talked about making improvements to the Elm Street Middle School before addressing the problems at Mount Pleasant.

But now that enough of a stink has been raised about conditions at Mount Pleasant, officials are thinking about moving the school to the front of the line for major renovations.

Which is probably something that should have been done a long time ago.

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