I am a junior attending Oak Harbor High School. I have been at OHHS since my freshman year, and every day for three years I have fought the crowded hallways to get from class to class.

In the Feb. 25 letter from Joyce King, she says that she observed the changing of classes but did not observe the overcrowding my mother is so concerned about (“Soundoff,” Feb. 11). Mrs. King, you say you observed the halls when students were changing classes. What hallway were you in and did you try to walk through the hall at all during that time? There have been days where I have stood in one place and gone nowhere for several minutes because there were so many students in the hallway. On the days this doesn’t happen, I have crept inch-by-inch down the hallway to get to my next class.

My classmates and I bolt out the door of our classrooms every day to try to avoid the rush of students, only to end up caught in the swarm. The hallways simply are not big enough for the amount of students that are trying to get through them! Two of my friends and I can successfully block the hallway if we stand side-by-side. In fact, in the yearbook my sophomore year it said that you knew you were at Oak Harbor High School if you could successfully block the hallway with three students side-by-side. This is not something a school should be proud of.

Teachers in Korea and Europe may move from classroom to classroom, but that wouldn’t work for teachers at OHHS. Would you honestly expect a science teacher, an art teacher, shop teacher, or any teacher to pack up their things and move from one classroom to another every single day? If a science teacher had to be in different classrooms every day, they wouldn’t be able to teach their subject as well as they would if they had the same classroom all day. You wouldn’t be able to do science labs because the classrooms weren’t set up for them. An art teacher who teaches pottery or metal design wouldn’t be able to teach this subject because they wouldn’t be able to move the equipment from room to room between classes. On top of that, valuable instruction time would be lost because supplies were being moved between classrooms. Having the teachers move from room to room would not be an acceptable solution to the crowding in the hallways at OHHS.

In closing, I would like to say that I will never use the new high school, if it ever happens. My youngest brother, who will be a freshman next year, will not attend the new OHHS, as it will not be completed until September 2010 and he will have graduated in June 2010. If I could vote for the bond, I would most definitely vote for a new school. No one should have to attend OHHS in the condition it is currently in.

Geneva Kenworthy

Oak Harbor