Photo - The Roanoke Times

On February 13 2010, the gym at Blacksburg High School collapsed.  Imploded.  Fell in on itself.  Here’s Statewide Demolition talkin about bunch of coverage, including multimedia, from The Roanoke Times …

Thank God no one was in the gym at the time, or was hurt.  Engineers and school officials have blamed it on a truss failure, but whatever the cause, the gym is no more.  And, it seems, no one knows what to do with the students, either.  Parents are upset because they either want their high schoolers to go to the middle school building, or they want their middle schoolers to not be shipped elsewhere in the county.

I don’t have a solution, first and foremost.  The old Blacksburg Middle School seems like a good solution (on the surface) for the high school to attend, but as you can see from the video below it’s not exactly in academic shape:

It’s actually pretty shocking at how badly that building has fallen into disrepair – the County acknowledges that the school is not in good shape, but why has the school board let it go to rot?  Certainly they’re not selling the school off to be used as, well, a school, but isn’t it more marketable to developers if it doesn’t require hard hats and breathing masks to enter?  How about repurposing the building and the land, rather than letting the building become dangerously unsafe?  I know, it’s been rehashed over and over for years, which seems ridiculous to me.

Anyway, school administrators are trying to figure out what to do with both Blacksburg Middle and the Blacksburg High in the fall.  Do they send one school or the other out to Christiansburg?  I can’t imagine any parent, particularly of children in both schools, would want to have to be trucking kids to various schools around the county for the indeterminate future.  It also doesn’t make long-term sense to have the high school going to school until nearly 7:30pm every weekday in order to run both schools through the Middle School building either.  So what’s to be done?

Are you a parent of a Blacksburg Middle or Blacksburg High student?  Have you seen the information that Montgomery County has put together regarding questions and comments concerning the proposed options (it’s pretty well-done and comprehensive, in my opinion – nice to see a complete recap being done for people to review)?  I guess I’m just curious more than anything – what do you think should be done?

Updated 6/30/10 12:45am – Montgomery County School Board reviewed nearly two dozen options tonight. Three are still on the table – and none are cheap.