Strings

April 9, 2007
Monday

Last winter, a woman who had lived most of her married life in the Camp Hill School District and whose son was a graduate of the high school gave the school $15 million to build a performing arts center. The gift was hailed as a magnanimous gesture that would have lasting impact on the arts scene. The woman was interviewed extensively and praised for her generosity and community spirit. Everyone was happy.

Sort of.

Camp Hill is a borough on what is called the “West Shore” of the Susquehanna River. (The city of Harrisburg and the suburb I live in are on the “East Shore.”) Not many people call it the “White Shore” anymore, although when I was in high school the only people of color you saw there were the domestics waiting for the buses back to the city at the end of the day, more of them on Thursdays, the day society homes were readied for the weekend. Although people of most socio-economic levels live in Camp Hill and it has its share (but maybe not its fair share) of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, most of the original residents were the second and third generations of the Old Money in the city. It’s a collection mostly of stately old mansions from the 1920s and large houses from the 40s and 50s on lots of ground.

I lived in Camp Hill the last two years I was in high school, in a typical 1960s tract house on land at the edge of the borough that had been an apple farm not long before. I did not attend Camp Hill High School. Even though we’d moved “across the river,” I was able to continue going to Bishop McDevitt High School on the East Shore. (And readers of this space will probably guess that to have been forced to leave that school would have been a great tragedy in my young life.)

My first reaction when I heard of this $15 million gift was one of slight disgruntlement. Although Camp Hill has a reputation for being home to wealthy or, at the least, fairly affluent people, no public school district has unlimited funds. Nevertheless, if I had that kind of money to give away, I might spread it around a little more. And though I am dedicated to the arts and sigh sometimes over how it gets short shrift (especially compared to athletics) in most civic budgets, I wondered about the wisdom of pouring so much money into an arts center that would benefit so few students. (Camp Hill School District has in grades K-12 the same number of students that were in the top four grades in Lynn’s high school and the one I taught in. Camp Hill High School has 350 students in the senior high, whereas Lynn’s school has 1000.) As I said, I’d be for spreading it around.

But the gift was given and accepted, and committees were formed and plans drawn up for the wonderful new arts center which would bear the name of its donor. $5 million was conveyed initially, with the rest to come in two more yearly installments.

And then things hit a snag. The donor wants the arts center built on the site of the elementary school her son attended. She is sentimentally attached to the building, which went up in 1955 and reflects the building standards for schools in place at the time, standards which are obsolete now, from technological, environmental, and safety standpoints. It’s not even used for regular classes anymore. The planners recommended demolition of the structure and construction of a state-of-the-art stand alone arts center.

The donor became angry. She wants the arts center to be an addition to the building she loves. She announced that she was withholding the rest of her gift unless the outdated (and, if you ask me, fairly ugly) building was preserved.

It’s been about a month since that story broke. It was back in the news today. The planners and the school district officials are scrambling around trying to come up with a compromise plan that will appease the donor, and failing that, a plan that will do exactly what she wants. Letters to the editor fall on both sides.

I know what it’s like to have a sentimental attachment to a building. I continue to keep that controversy in my prayers, knowing that I favor a course (staying and renovating) while, it is rumored, a large donor wants only to build new in the suburbs. I don’t have real money to spread around. My annual contribution to the school I love is in the very low three figures. But if I had a hundred thousand times that, I’d give it without strings.

And I think the Camp Hill donor should do that too. A gift with strings attached is no longer a gift, it’s a purchase.


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