Middleton High School, just northwest of where I live here in the Boise area, was
gutted by a fire that destroyed 70% of the building on Thursday:
The community has really
come together after the fire; luckily (and because of the skill of the firefighters) there were no deaths or serious injuries. Despite the loss of the major portion of the high school, the community was
able to look for other resources to ensure the 750 students could continue attending school without having to go to a different district:
Before Middleton High's fire subsided, Bauscher and his staff were working on a plan to keep the estimated 750 high school kids at the school complex instead of sending them to other districts.
Students will be housed in a district fine arts center, additional portable buildings the district intends to buy, parts of the middle school, high school rooms that were not affected by the fire and a nearby The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints multipurpose room. The church's stage will become a temporary theater for the high school's drama class.
Anyone notice a potential "problem" with that last paragraph? Anywhere other than Idaho, you'd probably have the ACLU up in arms about having public school children being sent to a church building for school. Here, though, the
Idaho ACLU doesn't really seem to do very much. I fear a bigger threat to this common-sense solution to the district's problem will come from the
anti-Mormon right; they've been telling their kids that Mormons aren't Christians, and aren't going to want to be answering questions like "why does that church that you've always said isn't Christian have all those pictures of Jesus up on the wall?" It'll be interesting for me to see how it turns out.
The community has really come together after the fire; luckily (and because of the skill of the firefighters) there were no deaths or serious injuries. Despite the loss of the major portion of the high school, the community was able to look for other resources to ensure the 750 students could continue attending school without having to go to a different district:
