There are plenty of valid reasons why a pre-school should not be placed in a particular area based on a town's zoning. But this one takes the cake.
Neighbors of the Montessori Farmhouse School said it had to go because they didn't want to hear "noise generated by laughter and screaming of young children during outdoor playtime."
Oh, the horrors. Imagine, children laughing! Children screaming out each other's names. Children, children, children!
To be fair, there were other reasons neighbors cited for saying bye bye to the pre-school, including traffic in their rural community in the woods of Washington state. But the fact that they brought this particular "issue" to light has been getting the most attention.
As well it should.
The neighborhood was rural residential, zoned for homes with daycare centers allowable under a special permitting process. In other words, we're talking about the perfect environment for kids to run around in, make noise and just be kids. As developers overtake some of the pristine lands left in this country, these are the kinds of neighborhoods that are disappearing, along with the kids, who are often relegated to indoor play in neighborhoods full of traffic and too-close neighbors with too-small yards.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere, in a place I dare say was even more
quiet than the six-acre property in a rural residential neighborhood
where the Montessori school was being run. My parents' neighbors were
largely second homeowners who were rarely around, and I had the run of the dead-end road. I could scream my lungs out, and no one would hear. It was marvelous. Today, living in a still-small neighborhod, I relish hearing the neighbor's little boy shrieking in delight as he runs pell mell across the yard at the dog or the other neighbors' grandson whooping it up on his tree swing. We're still rural enough that they CAN play outside.
We don't have a school here, no teachers tell our kids where to play or when or direct them not to trample on lawns or keep their voices down.
Yet the hearing examiner who denied the school said the noise would be "materially detrimental to single-family residential properties in the immediate vicinity." He warned that kids going out into the woods to examine the bugs and the trees and the streams "probably would not stay on the footpath during their trips into the
woods and would likely trample the stream banks and vegetation in the
wetland."
Imagine that - the kids might go exploring. And I suppose deer don't trample vegetation in the wetlands? And squirrels gather their nuts only on footpaths, I'd bet.
I'll give you concerns about site distance regarding the school's driveway or sewage issues, but the idea that adding kids to a residential neighborhood is deterimental is just plain bizarre. Isn't that what residential neighborhoods are for? Places for kids to grow up? The Montessori school, by the way, expected to have no more than forty children when operating at full capacity.
Would you be mad if kids laughed next door? Even forty of them?
Image: LittleGym
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