Pole-vault pit ripped from Wentworth plan

SCARBOROUGH — At some point in your life, you’ve probably heard somebody say of an idea, it’s so bad, “I wouldn’t touch that with a 10-foot pole.”

Nobody at a special meeting of the Scarborough School Board – held Thursday, June 23 – used that phrase. Not out loud anyway. But a few in the audience may have been thinking it. That’s because, in this case, the topic of discussion was an actual 10-foot pole.

Although champions of replacing the outdated Benjamin F. Wentworth Intermediate School have scaled back their plans from a $38.5 million proposal put before voters in 2006, their “wish list” still contained some quirks. Chief among these was a pole-vault pit to have been built inside the new school’s cafeteria. Students would have run screaming down a hallway into the lunch room, jabbed their pole into the pit (covered when not in use) and launched themselves over a bar and onto mats that, when not in use, would have been held aloft over tables by a system of ropes and pulleys.

At a June 2 School Board meeting, Chairman Christopher Brownsey admitted, “That’s not normally something you’d find in a Grade 3-5 school, but it’s there today and there isn’t another home [for it].”

When the existing pit was built in 1962, Wentworth was a junior high school. School Board member Jacquelyn Perry, who chairs the athletics sub-group of the 41-person Wentworth Building Committee, said putting a pole-vault pit in Wentworth was necessary because it would cost too much to tear up the gym floor at the high school to create a similar indoor facility there. However, the pit was no mere “wish-list” item, she said, at a June 16 board meeting. Like everything put forth by the ad hoc building committee, the pole-vault pit was “absolutely essential for our children,” she claimed.

But what a difference a week can make.

At the June 23 special meeting, Perry said that should voters approve a construction bond come November, schoolchildren would not go soaring through the air inside the new Wentworth cafeteria.

“Research indicated we would need much more lateral space and a higher ceiling that we previously thought,” she explained. “[As designed] the current space is not up to the standard necessary for pole-vaulting. If we moved forward as anticipated, our liability issues would be enormous.”

According to Perry, holding out for a properly sized pole vault space will add $1.5 million to the project.

“We are going to have to remove from our recommendation the accommodation for pole-vaulting from the cafeteria of the new school,” she announced, asking the school board for an “addendum by deletion” to the recommendations it approved from her committee on June 2.