Guest Editorial by Chloe Thorton

The Annex was never meant to house students. Ever.

There have always been issues. Health concerns. Structural problems. Safety issues.
Recently, these have become unable to ignore and questions about the annex’s safety and security have risen.

The problems start as soon as you walk in. That’s just it. There is nothing stopping anybody from coming into the building off the street, and people do. Both debate and Spanish classes have been disrupted by people who did not belong there. This is obviously not safe for Lawrence High’s students and teachers both who have to be in the annex.

However, it’s easier for everyone to have these doors unlocked. If everyone had to wait for someone to open the door every time they went in and out of the annex, passing periods would have to be

substantially longer. Students must also think about how they would feel if all the doors around them were locked at all times. It would seem like less of a school and more of a prison. To please everybody, administrators would have to find a happy medium between student attitudes and student security and when even the students can’t all agree with each other, this is impossible.

The security of the building is not the only concerning issue. At the beginning of this school year, classrooms in the annex had been emptied and then put back together again which caused a confusion among students. However, it soon came to light that the annex had been treated for asbestos over the summer.

Asbestos is a known human carcinogen (a substance that causes cancer) and if disturbed, it can also lead to lung disease. A more obvious problem is the bathrooms. They are outdated and extremely small. If you think more than one person can wash their hands at the same time or people can walk past each other comfortably, think again. In the hallways the floor is uneven, there are stains everywhere and they are so narrow three people can barely fit. The state of the classrooms is not much different. However, considering all of these issues, students don’t see these as the matters that most concern themselves.
Getting to the annex seems to be the largest concern among my peers.

“Walking there sucks when it’s cold or rainy,” sophomore Kacee Truong said.

The walk to the annex is one of the most dreaded parts of my day and from what I hear on the walk over there, I am not alone. The grumbles have become normal and a part of my daily routine. Even if the physical conditions are fine, as soon as I step outside, my mental attitude falls because having to walk outside to get to a class at 9 o’clock in the morning does not appeal to my body. Along with the weather, the path from the east doors to the annex does not serve a helpful purpose when a couple hundred students are trying to squeeze past each other at the same time. In the dry seasons this generally doesn’t affect us too much because we just walk on the grass to make more room for others. However, when

Lawrence has had three straight days of rain, the soggy, waterlogged grass is not the most appealing idea. If you’re going to make students walk to an outside class in less than satisfactory conditions, then at least provide means for them to do so.

Students know when it starts getting cold, the walk to the annex somehow gets longer and longer. Running there seems like the only option but with the amount of students passing each other, it’s basically impossible. Having to go outside to get to the annex when it is raining or snowing is also a struggle for many. Some students carry laptops for classes and most carry notebooks, if these get wet and destroyed, the consequences could be costly. If you ask a student how they would fix this, most suggest a hallway or “tunnel” between the two buildings. Others simply say we should just get rid of the annex all together. Actually achieving these solutions is easier said than done.

I understand how the school cannot just add a new wing to the main building at the drop of a hat. It’s taken workers at least four months just to replace a wall and a door that was supposed to be done over the summer.

Nobody expects that to be done any time soon. We all speculate about plans for something to happen. But the district only just hired an architect to look at problems. It will be years before any physical action is taken, if they even decide to do anything. These plans of action need to be fast-tracked so that our school can be safer for everybody.