43
Peaceful protest gives last say to Reserve supporters
By ED RUNYAN
WARREN
To Mark Clawges, Western Reserve High School wasn’t built on the wrong side of town, but it might have been on the wrong side of the tracks.
Clawges, among about 20 people who peacefully protested Thursday morning in front of the former high school on Loveless Avenue Southwest, carried a sign saying “Warren City School Board Fiscal Irresponsibility” and “Million Dollar Waste.”
The million he refers to is how much the Reserve demolition will cost, Clawges said, though school officials say that estimate is a little high.
Clawges, a 1968 Reserve graduate, said he and others understand that the building is going to be leveled soon, but they don’t want to let it go without getting a few things off their chests.
To Clawges, the school board made a mistake in selecting the site for the building, which opened in fall 1967, because it was right next to a declining housing project, Westlawn. It was torn down about 2001, and today the area around Reserve is considered one of the most-blighted parts of the city.
Reserve also was built just south of a busy railroad line, which meant that students frequently were late for school if they lived to the north, like he did, Clawges said.
There were times when the trains blocked the roads leading to the school, Clawges remembers. The city built a bridge over West Market Street to provide an alternate route.
Clawges said the decision to build Reserve at that site is probably one reason the building lasted only 23 years as a high school before being converted to a middle school in 1991.
Clawges and others have complained that the 44-year-old building should not be torn down because it still could serve a useful purpose as a recreational center, city-office building or community college.
Clawges said he thinks the school board avoided those options, however, because state law would have required the board of education to offer the building to a charter school before any other use could have been considered, and the school district feared losing more students to a charter or private school.
Exterior demolition of the building is expected to commence sometime next week, though 45 days’ worth of asbestos abatement already has been done, and some interior demolition is complete.
Sharon Edwards, a 1967 Reserve graduate who attended the rally, said the location for Reserve didn’t seem bad in 1968 because two new housing developments had just been built nearby: the Palmyra Heights neighborhood at the southwestern end of Palmyra Road and the Kenwood Park neighborhood just south of Reserve.
“We were booming,” Edwards said. “It was such a wonderful town. We had GM, Republic Steel, Packard Electric, Thomas Steel, Copperweld. Guys came home from Vietnam, and they didn’t have to beg for a job. The town was open wide,” she said.
Sue Tobias, a 1968 graduate, said Reserve was one of the finest schools around.
“We had the planetarium, horticulture, nursing, auto-body shop, swimming pool, beautiful library; and we had good teachers,” she said.