A story in Monday’s Lexington Herald-Leader suggested there are safety issues dangling unnoticed for students in the newly approved move planned for the Bluegrass Community and Technical College in a few years.
BCTC will unite its three campuses into one with the move to a site now occupied by Eastern State Hospital at the corner of Fourth Street and Newtown Pike. The state would lease 28 acres at the University of Kentucky’s Coldstream Research Campus for a new Eastern State, and UK would get most of the classrooms and parking spaces now occupied by BCTC’s Cooper Campus, one of three BCTC is consolidating.
It looked like a win-win situation.
But Monday’s story seemed to insert fear into the mix. The area where the new BCTC campus would be located is surrounded by lower-income neighborhoods and the Hope Center, an emergency shelter and resource center for the homeless.
Because of that, I guess, there is reason for students to worry about their safety.
Please.
Were the students safe last year at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, also known as Virginia Tech? That school is located in a rural, small town setting. What about Dawson College in Montreal in 2006? Did the big city cause that? Or at the Appalachian School of Law in 2002? Maybe that had something to do with the student failing to adjust to the mountains.
What college or school campus is considered safe nowadays? As someone about to send her last child off to college, I couldn’t find one. None of my fears, however, has anything to do with the location. I thought we as a shell-shocked society would have learned that by now.
BCTC will thrive in the new central location that will contain all it has to offer the students of Lexington and the surrounding areas. It will probably help those in nearby under-served communities to get a higher education and improve their economic status.
It’s a win-win situation, as long as we don’t let old fears hold us back.
I am a native Kentuckian, and I have worked at the Lexington Herald-Leader for nearly a quarter of a century. I've been a columnist for almost 20 of those years, dispensing my opinions about anything and everything. Born in Owensboro, Ky., I'm old enough to have lived through racial segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, protests against the Vietnam War, and the break-up of the Beatles. That means I am "old school," and my thoughts emanate from that perspective.
1 Comment
April 9, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Good job, Merlene. One of my fellow employees said, “Let me put it to you this way. How would you feel if it was your daughter leaving class after a night class? I was able to reply that my daughter worked at the Northside YMCA across Loudon Ave from the proposed site since she was sixteen and never had any trouble although she left work many nights at 10 pm closing after finishing her shift as a lifeguard.