Poor planning

It is poor planning to plop a shopping center in front of a school, completely blocking it from view. Who wants to look out the window during math class and stare at the back of a gigantic gray box? Schools don’t belong in commercial areas. I have attended four schools in my lifetime, all of them in quiet, residential neighborhoods. Schools should be in areas where it’s safe to cross the street, not where hundreds of people go shopping every day.

You also need to consider how many cars a new Wal-Mart would attract. Traffic is chaotic enough with several hundred high-schoolers driving to and from the school parking lot every day. It’s common to wait 10 minutes to get out of there. I can’t even imagine how traffic will multiply with a Wal-Mart parking lot competing against us.

How much further will we go before we say that enough is enough? How much longer will we continue giving into the greed of big corporations, even when they turn our town into a giant strip mall? I support leaving the field alone. We don’t need to develop every square inch of land. If development must occur, building homes is the obvious thing to do. It’s a residential neighborhood, and Wal-Mart has no place there.

William Mockry,

Lawrence