Twice each school day, the students at Manzanola Junior-Senior High School trek the five blocks between their 93-year-old building on the south end of town and the elementary school to the north to eat breakfast and lunch.
Snow, rain, no matter. The journey is a necessity if kids don’t want to go hungry.
All of the 133 students in the Manzanola 3J school district, just northwest of La Junta, receive free meals. The high school, however, has no cafeteria.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing; I was floored when I first got the job,” district Superintendent Tom Wilke said in an interview. “Who has to walk five blocks just to get lunch?”
The old high school, built in Manzanola’s better days, has other problems too. Lots of other problems.
“There have been several incidents in recent years where areas of the … high school have been shut down due to ceiling collapses, flooding from roof leaks … and backed up sanitary lines,” the district wrote in its application for a BEST grant to build a new school to replace the seven aging ones they use. (Read more about the BEST program, which sends money from marijuana taxes and other sources to schools, in the main story.)
There is no entrance to the auditorium except from the outside, no restroom on the first floor and, in one case, a student who uses a walker has to eat in the only classroom she is able to access on days when the weather prevents her from taking the trip across town with her classmates.
“She would come home on a daily basis and tell me that she was tired of being alone during her class hours and eating by herself every day,” said her mother, Christine Padilla. “She should be able to get a quality education like any other child her age … without worrying even how and who is going to get her to the bathroom.”
The BEST board agreed. Twice.
But local voters, 262 of 454 this last time, have twice said no to a bond issue that would cover the districtap $2 million share of the $20 million project. A house worth $50,000 would see about $4 a month in additional property taxes, Wilke said.
Many of the voters are senior citizens or farmers, with no children or who opt to send their children to a different district, Wilke said.
“This community, if they don’t put a new school in there, maybe two years, maybe five, it will be gone,” Wilke said.
