There’s some things you might expect living next to a school, a little extra noise, maybe a ball accidentally coming over the fence once in a while. But for one neighbor of Sage, the deliberate littering from the students has become a daily nightmare.
After school days she is left picking up considerable amounts of trash and students’ belongings, everything from clothing like shoes and sweatshirts, countless balls thrown over the fence, homework papers, water bottles, food items like juice boxes and bags of carrot sticks, even a hula hoop!
As you can see in the diagram below, the school “play area” highlighted in yellow is on the edge of the campus, directly against the residential side of the property. This shows poor planning, seeming that a play area was more of an afterthought than a planned out amenity for the school.
What is worse is that on the school side of the fence, there are trees that the kids can climb and pop over the brick wall that divides the properties. One neighbor has to chronically deal with children that pop over the wall and torment her dogs. That this is often seen during school hours indicates that the children are lacking adult supervision.
When a neighbor brought these concerns to School Director, Sandra Kinne, citing certain items that were cast over the wall over into her yard, Ms Kinne flat out denied that it ever happened. Instead of acknowledging that there is a problem with her students behavior, the Director instead tried to gaslight the neighbor. That is the level of accountability we are seeing from this school and the staff and it needs to change.
This is a collection of items thrown over the fence from just the past few days. If this was a rare occurrence, no one would be concerned, but this indicates an ongoing problem stemming from unsupervised students.
From the lack of accountability from the school director, the problems stemming from unsupervised/undersupervised kids, the location of the play area, the easy access the students have to climb up and over the wall, it is the recipe for the perfect storm to destroy the good relations with neighbors. If the school won’t even address these simple concerns, we have no hope any of the other issues will change either. We need to demand more accountability from Kinne and the school.