GLENVAR – For 50 years, Joyce and Carl Basham have lived in the same comfortable brick home across from acres of tall white oaks, hickories and other hardwoods turning golden and red these fall days.
Now the Bashams and their neighbors on Westward Lake, Tobey Lane and Ingal fear that what they know as “Glenvar Woods” is going to be cut down.
Joyce and Carl Basham have lived in their house across from Glenvar Woods for 50 years, and don’t want a road to the school through their neighborhood. Photo by Meg Hibbert
In its place, they believe, a road could be built to run school buses and high school kids in cars twice a day. There might even be an athletic field where now there are trees.
But the school board member who represents their area says that isn’t so. What is being surveyed now “would be an emergency access road in case we needed to get firetrucks and students to and from the school if Tobey or Malus were not available,” David Wymer emphasized. “It would be gated access, not an everyday use road.”
About 40 neighbors who live behind Glenvar Middle and high school got together Nov. 4 at the new Glenvar Branch Library to plan their strategy, opposing a new school road or athletic field in their front yard. They plan to turn out en masse at the Nov. 14 Roanoke County School Board meeting to express their concerns.
David Wymer, who represents the Glenvar area on the Roanoke County School Board, is encouraging them to attend.
“They’ve either been misinformed or haven’t asked the right person, me,” he said.
Wymer said in an interview with the Salem Times-Register yesterday there’s “No truth to that idea it would be access to future athletic fields,”
Wymer said. “There are no plans or moneys in the current budget for the Glenvar High School renovation project to upgrade or add any additional athletic fields or parking lots for those fields,” he said.
One of the reasons neighbors haven’t been shown any plans is construction ideas are still in the preliminary stage, Wymer emphasized. Construction to GHS is anticipated to start in 2014, with students expected to be in the new building by fall 2015, he said. “We’re getting ready to approve in March or April funds for the Glenvar High School project.”
Surveying two weeks ago tipped off residents, resident Brian Hooker said, that something was going on. They were already suspicious, after 20 construction trailers were moved onto a section of recently cleared land owned by the Roanoke County School Board a year ago, near where Hooker and others believe the road will go.
On Oct. 30 a smaller group of Westlake neighborhood residents met at Brian and Martha Hooker’s home on a private section off Westward Lake. Martha Hooker teaches at Glenvar High School and her husband, a former teacher and coach at GHS, now teaches world geography at Andrew Lewis Middle School in Salem.
Becky Witt has lived across from Glenvar Woods for 22 years. She and her husband, David, have been married for 10 years. Neither is happy with the idea that the school board has designs on what neighbors have come to think of as their woods, a place to walk and enjoy nature, and to take their dogs.
“It would just destroy a nice, pleasant quiet place to live. We don’t need it (a road),” Becky Witt said. In spite of Wymer’s assurances to them by email that the possible road would be for emergency access only, David Witt believes “It’s a done deal. They’re going to do what they want.”
Wymer said in the interview this week that the reason the trailers used to house classes during construction were moved into the woods was they had to be relocated from other county school construction projects after those were completed, and money was not available to start new projects this soon.
Wymer also said the school board has two easements off Ingal that are being considered for emergency access roads, but that the school construction committee believed fewer people would be impacted off Westward Lake.
Catawba District Supervisor Butch Church has not become involved in the discussion, neighbors said. “I can’t believe a county supervisor would let them (school board) run a road through this neighborhood.”
