Tucson Citizen, Thursday, July 30, 1998
After months of insisting that no other location would do, Amphitheater school officials are looking at other possible sites for a new high school.
The half-hearted effort reflects a fear that they may have no choice. But the district has had choices all along, and the time to give serious consideration to those choices is long overdue.
School officials still favor the 70-acre site at North Shannon Road and West Naranja Drive originally purchased for the new high school. But environmentalists sued to stop construction there because they view it as prime habitat for endangered owls.
Amphi officials want to be prepared in case an appeals court rules against them.
It's encouraging to see the school district take even an itsy, bitsy step in a possible new direction - given it's previous stubborn refusal to look at other options.
Amphi is taking a second look at 10 sites considered before the Shannon-Naranja property was purchased.
It also has looked at 16 sites proposed by environmental groups and determined that a few would be suitable for a new school.
If school officials had been more wiling to work with environmentalists all along, they might have avoided costly court battles and school construction delays.
Instead, the district took the arrogant position that it had every right to build on it's chosen site, and no one was going to stand in its way without a legal order.
If the resulting quagmire teaches the school board a few lessons in the art of compromise, that would be consolation.
There's no reason the district can't find a school site to meet students' needs without posing a possible threat to the endangered owls.
Yes, the district stands to lose a lot of money. And yes, that won't sell well with plenty of district residents. If Amphi officials had been more open-minded from the start, they could have avoided that predicament.
Instead of finding a new site only if forced, school officials should do so in the art of compromise.