As a student from Zuni High School I have some concerns about the safety of the building and its structures. It has cracks in the floor which means the foundation of the whole school was not structured right. Since there are multiple problems with the school, the district is planning on making a new school. The plan is to make the school a conjoined, or what is called a “co-located”, school with the middle school. They plan on making the conjoined school at the high school and plan on making it bigger. Hopefully the structure of the schools are better and hopefully the building is big enough for all the students who will be attending the school.

There is definitely a need for a new school because not only are there structural problems at ZHS, but our Zuni Middle School is even older because our parents attended the school when they were in middle school. They have seen many problems with the school when they were still attending it. How much more now after a few decades back? The school has had many problems over the years and they have fixed some but it was somewhat temporary. Since the plan is to conjoin the high school and middle school I hope that the problems would be fixed.

Conjoining the two schools may sound like a ridiculous idea because I have not heard of such a school before. High school students and middle school students are somewhat two different groups of students and I don’t know if combining them would be a good idea. But if the combination will yield into a better school then probably I will be supportive of that move from the school district. From an article about co-location in The Washington Post called “The unintended consequences of forcing schools to share the same building”, by Valerie Strauss it says that “Yet co-location is not a new idea. In the late 1980s, the small-schools movement sought to break down large, comprehensive high schools into smaller schools within a school. The idea behind this reform effort was that students’ academic needs would be better met in more intimate settings where teachers could facilitate more personalized and more democratic learning opportunities.” So if it worked in the late 1980s, hopefully it will work to this day. Even though the world has changed so much over the years we can just improve on a co-located school.

The old high school was built on unstable grounds and if they plan on constructing a new building near the location of the old building they should make sure that the foundation will be strong enough to support the new building. They should check the stability of the grounds and that the foundations should be strong enough to support the higher structure. They have a lot of work ahead of them for a new school or well a co-located school that fits all students and incoming students. Overall I just hope it all works out for the district because we really need a new school.

Zuni Public School District has made their plans clear that they plan to build a co-joined campus to combine both the middle school and high school over the next five to seven years. At this point, they better make precise plans to accommodate both schools. They better make the school a safe environment so the students and parents know that they are at a school that won’t break on them. They will be having high expectations from people so hopefully they meet these expectations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/10/28/unintended-consequences-forcing-schools-share-same-building/ (Accessed 2/28/22).