KEENE VALLEY - Heeding parents' worries about traffic and strangers, the Keene Central School board is passing on a proposal to host a mail facility in this hamlet where the U.S. Postal Service eliminated the post office last year.
The school board did not take action Tuesday night on an application to the USPS for the school to host a contract postal unit (CPU), but it was clear that the board was burying the option.
"I think the consensus is that that would not be a good fit for the school," school board President Jim Marlatt said Wednesday.
Keene Valley residents currently have to get and send mail in the hamlet of Keene, 5 miles away.
An architect had sketched how Room 111 at the school could accommodate mailboxes and a retail counter, and many logistics of the plan had been worked out. But Aline Pepe, Nicky Frechette, Deb Holmes, Kathy Smith and Lisa Smith all spoke against the proposal at Tuesday's meeting, citing traffic concerns and fear of sexual predators. When some in the crowd began to raise their voices, the board announced its decision to reject the proposition.
Pepe has had eight children go through KCS and currently has her youngest and two grandchildren there. She said the facts that security cameras, a speed bump and special hours were planned for the school CPU shows that there is danger.
"I completely understand the need for a post office in Keene Valley," Pepe said Wednesday. "I feel badly for people who don't have a car, the elderly people ... but I don't believe you fix one problem by creating another."
Some in this community of roughly 500 people don't think residents getting their mail should be considered suspicious strangers.
"I think Keene Valley is a community where people do know each other," Henrietta Jordan, a leading organizer for a new postal facility who was at Tuesday's school board meeting, said Wednesday. "In the summer there are more people coming in. It's true that we are a tourist Mecca, and in that sense there are a certain number of strangers around, but I think this is also a community where people are looking out for each other."
Superintendent Cynthia Ford-Johnston, who doubles as principal for the K-12 school, said that although she respects parents' concerns about strangers on school property, she personally does not share them.
"I think it's a lot of fear - unwarranted fear, actually - but I understand people's concern," Ford-Johnston said Wednesday. "There was a general sense of anxiety" at the meeting. "Even before the meeting, I had gotten a number of calls and emails from parents.
"I've had a number of positive comments (about a school mail facility) from people as well, but they're not people who have children in the school district."
"I think it was a necessary decision by the school board," Jordan said, "in the sense that I don't think the school board wants to get involved in a controversy in something that's not related to school programs, curriculum, that kind of thing. But I thought the concerns that were raised by the parents were unfortunately misguided."
Jordan has professional experience with stranger danger. She said she worked in child abuse prevention programs in Vermont and Massachusetts and founded the victim assistance program in the Vermont attorney general's Child Protection Unit. In her view, the concern voiced at Tuesday's meeting was a "sensationalistic view of child abuse that unfortunately people have gotten from the media.
"I just don't believe that pedophiles and people who are bent on hurting children are going to be going to that facility," Jordan said. "Parents need to understand that it's not stranger danger that's a threat to their children but the possibility of being abused by someone they know and trust."
"Just because I live in the same town as someone doesn't mean I want them hanging around the school," Pepe said Wednesday. "Just because someone lives in this sweet little town doesn't make them a sweet little person."
Plus, Pepe said, it wouldn't just be local residents; some of the many hikers who pass through Keene Valley would go there to buy stamps and mail packages.
"It just invites too many people to have an excuse to be at the school for too long a period of time," Pepe said.
Frechette, who will have two children at KCS in the fall, said she isn't very worried about strangers but is worried that traffic congestion at the Keene post office would be transferred to the school and its quiet Market Street. Pepe agreed.
"That spot is an accident waiting to happen," Pepe said of the Keene post office. "To move that extra traffic into the school ... it just creates extra traffic, and wherever there's extra traffic, there's extra risk of people getting hurt."
The options are now slim for anything more than clustered outdoor mailboxes in Keene Valley, Jordan said.
"Our little informal committee is still hopeful," Jordan said. They're open to ideas for a CPU location, but "if none emerge, we probably will begin planning for the eventuality of cluster boxes because that's really our only remaining option."
But Pepe and Frechette disagree; they say the library would be a good place for a CPU. That would require adding on to the building since it's too small now, Frechette said, but she supports that.
---
Martha Allen contributed to this report.