Vernonia school officials cheer bond passage

Tax dollars from $13 million bond will help build new schools on higher ground

By Stover E Harger III

The South County Spotlight, Nov 11, 2009, Updated Nov 11, 2009

Stover E. Harger III / The Spotlight

Vernonia School District Superintendent Ken Cox stands in front of the Vernonia Elementary School. The school, built in the 1930s, is still in use, though it has been flood-damaged and is slated for demolition.

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VERNONIA — When the destructive 2007 flood hit Vernonia, Kenneth Cox remembers watching helplessly as the water rose, inch by inch.

The Vernonia School District superintendent saw devastating damage to the elementary, middle and high school buildings, and district offices. The gym floor buckled, walls were ruined and classrooms were, in a day, made unsafe by the waist-deep muddy water. Everything was ruined.

But now, Cox, district officials, teachers and students have a reason to cheer.

Voters last week passed — with 61 percent for and 39 percent against — a $13 million bond to help pay for a soon-to-be-built $37 million school that will sit above the flood plain on the current site of Spencer Park near the north end of Missouri Avenue.

The morning after the bond passed, Cox led an assembly to show students what their shining new 140,000-square-foot home away from home will look like when it opens next fall.

For nearly two years, middle and high schoolers in Vernonia have had to attend classes in portable buildings, at a rental cost of $12,000 a month. The students have also struggled with not having many of the perks that they had with a permanent school, such as lockers. But when they got a look at the plans for the new school, enthusiasm exploded out from them, Cox said.

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