Jump on the floor of Room 220 at Bowling Green High School, and the ripple can be felt throughout the
room.
The same holds true in Rooms 218 and 222, said Principal Jeff Dever during a tour of the school on
Tuesday.
The tour preceded the seventh and final facilities task force meeting.
“Don’t do that again,” one woman murmured after Dever, weighing 285 pounds, leaped up and down.
There is something wrong with the second-floor flooring and the first-floor ceiling of these three rooms,
he said.
Dever shared a cautionary tale that he was told, at the time the Bowling Green City Schools district
opened the school.
“When the building gets older, it may be a problem,” Dever said he was told.
Today, “it might be a problem.”
He also invited anyone into the crawl space at the southwest entrance to the school to check out the deck
plate.
“It’s not the best-looking construction of a school,” Dever said.
The gym, which had a practice going on at 6 p.m., is the smallest in the league. It also doubles as space
for fifth-period study hall.
“I cringe every time we put a person in fifth-period study hall,” he said. Students sit in the bleachers
“because I have no place to put them.”
Dever said he wishes he had another large gathering space, similar to the theater-style seating of a
classroom in the Education Building at Bowling Green State University.
The boys’ locker room, which was ready to collapse due to excessive moisture from the underfloor venting
system, has since been corrected at a cost of roughly $350,000. Before the work was done last summer,
only the concrete was holding up the floor.
The upstairs rooms are heated with a wall unit that dates back to when the school opened in 1964.
“It’s pretty ineffective,” Dever said. “It’s not the optimal way to heat a classroom.”
Conversely, the high temperatures on the second floor during the summer caused classes to be canceled
last August.
“Francis made the right call,” he said, referring to Superintendent Francis Scruci. “It wasn’t conducive
to learning.
“None of you have to work in an environment like that. And you shouldn’t expect your kids to either.”
Task force member Frances Brent said that she did not have air conditioning when she was a child. If you
were hot, you sweated or played outside.
“This is not the environment our young people are growing up in,” she said. They go from an
air-conditioned home to an air-conditioned car, then perspire in class.
“I don’t take this air conditioning and heating so lightly,” Brent said.
This is how the district tells us to educate their kids, Dever said, and “we’re doing a good job keeping
our school running well.”
There are other limitations, such as two handicapped-accessible bathrooms in the entire building, and not
being able to communicate except on the public address system if an emergency happens.
Technology in the school is “not as good as the best but better than most,” Dever said.
While renovating BGHS is not on the immediate must-do list for the school district, that didn’t stop
people from asking for a list of everything that is needed to boost the learning environment.
Dever said he would have a list by Friday.