What's old is new again.

Mansfield High School, 54 years old and still going strong.

I've been reading stories in my old newspaper about scoreboard replacements and the need for new schools and how "the taxpayers are getting screwed!" and so on, and I just have to chuckle.

Anyone in a town whose last "new" high school was built in the 1970s has absolutely no right to complain about anything. Unless they spent the money to properly maintain their "new" high school over the many years since it was built, they've gotten their money's worth. And if they had spent the extra money, maybe they wouldn't be faced with the need to build a new high school now.

I just want to point out a few facts about my hometown that has preserved it from some of this angst -- and not just because I think the town is superior to its neighbors (it is, of course), but just because what they did in Mansfield over the latter half of the 20th century seems to have made so much more sense now.

My dad's high school, now the Town Hall.

When my father entered Mansfield High School in the fall of 1933, the school he attended was 21 years old. It was built in 1912 -- yes, the year that Fenway Park went up and the Titanic went down -- and my father graduated in 1937. He got married in 1945, moved back to Mansfield, went to work in the family clothing store and in 1954, I arrived on the planet -- the same year that Mansfield opened a new high school on East Street.

The old Mansfield High School still stands today. It was repurposed into the Park Row Elementary School for many years, and then was renovated from top to bottom to become the town hall in 1997.

I entered the East Street school in 1967 as an eighth-grader (yes, we listened to the World Series games between the Red Sox and Cardinals over the intercoms), but already, the town had looked at at growing enrollment numbers and realized that the school would soon be obsolete. Over winter vacation in the 1969-70 school year, the second Mansfield High School on East Street opened. I graduated from that school in June 1971.

The Qualters School added new wings.

So, the school at the South Common lasted 42 years as MHS. The first one on East Street served in that capacity for just 16 years (although through the perception of youth, I thought it had been there forever before we moved out of it). It, too, has been repurposed as the Harold L. Qualters Middle School, named after the former MHS principal.

And the current MHS has been in place for 54 years and is still going strong. It's been renovated and enlarged (some of the enlargements aren't needed right now), and boilers and roofs have been repaired. And we're even getting around to finally replacing the 54-year-old gym floor this summer for the use of our outstanding basketball teams and other related necessities.

So why aren't we talking about the need for a new high school as neighboring North Attleboro is? 

Well, maybe it's because we paid when needed to take care of this building. We didn't decide to artificially lessen the tax rate by letting things slide when maintaining a building was necessary.

North's history of high schools is similar to Mansfield's. Mansfield had two older wooden buildings serve as the high school before the Park Row school was opened to accommodate changing times. North had two high school buildings burn down before the one downtown (now called the Community School) was opened in 1919. It lasted as NAHS for 54 years before the current school opened on Wilson Whitty Way, and that school is now 51 years old. 

The debate is ramping up in North whether to build a new high school or simply renovate (although it looks like a new building is becoming inevitable). And thus, in a town where the bottom line on the tax bill has always been artificially low, taxpayers are facing high sticker shock because not only are they likely to have to pay $250 million for a new high school in the near future, they are also having to foot the largest share of the bill for a new Tri-County Regional Vocational-Technical High School in Franklin because they send the largest number of students to it.

Someone plug it in!

So when people learned last week that the new $300,000 scoreboard at the high school football field might not work because there isn't enough electricity flowing into the stadium project to power everything, it was panic in the streets in Big Red Country. I won't bore you with all of the details or the reactions, but in a nutshell, North has spent $6 million or so to renovate the football stadium. Of course, people with axes to grind complain that that is causing the potholes in the streets to go unrepaired. And now there's a subculture emerging that says that families that don't have kids in the schools shouldn't have to pay for public education.

If you want to amuse yourself, just go to The Sun Chronicle's Facebook page and read the comments below stories about the North school building projects. Most telling are the number of respondents that react like this is the first time any of these issues have ever come up, even though something like the stadium project has been underway since the stands were condemned in 2018. You know what they say about "an informed electorate," right? 

Hey, this may happen soon enough in Mansfield, too. At some point, the needs of a 21st century education will outstrip the infrastructure of a building built in 1970, no matter how much we try to keep up with the changes. I may not be around by then, but it would be interesting to see where the town could build a new high school. There's not enough room next to the existing one to put up a new one and keep the old one operating. Across the street, the Robinson and Jordan-Jackson elementary schools take up a lot of space. Town-owned Memorial Park on Hope Street might have to be sacrificed to maintain a campus atmosphere for Mansfield's school facilities, but surrounding wetlands and nearby residential properties make that a can of worms to be opened another day.

But in the meantime, there is no panic in the streets in Hornetville. Not just because of what's available to read, either; people in this town seem to have an honest commitment to their children and the quality of their education, not to mention a fuller understanding of what it means to live in a "community."