Feature Photo By: Jaylen Dunbar – Bird’s eye footage of Mrachek construction. Mrachek has been under construction for the past few months.
In November of 2016, elections were taking place along with various proposals that were approved with the elected candidate, and among these proposals, the community approved Measure 3C, a $300 million dollar bond APS received to fund building and technology improvements for every school in the district.
As a result, the project to build a new Mrachek began almost instantly as the bond included funds to replace the old school.
Nevertheless, a bond that the APS district desperately needed to help out students all over Aurora brought a challenge to others at Rangeview.
But what exactly are these new challenges that students at Rangeview are facing?
Recently, the lacrosse and baseball programs have lost their fields due to the reconstruction of Mrachek taking place on a field Rangeview used for lower level baseball and lacrosse during the spring. The field was located across the street from Rangeview on Telluride and Evans.
In short, both programs had to look for new fields to play for home games, including everyday practice this season.
Rangeview was expected to spend more money for buses to travel and take baseball and lacrosse players to home games, which took place in Arapahoe Park on Kentucky and Buckley road.
“It feels a bit odd now knowing that we can’t simply walk to practice right after school but have to drive over to practice every time,”said Junior Jordi Yomona, varsity lacrosse player.
Staff at Rangeview has been told that once Mrachek is finished, which is predicted to be ready for the school year 2018-19, the previous baseball and lacrosse fields will be put back, even though the new Mrachek building will be where those old fields once stood. Regardless, nothing is assured since the whole situation that Rangeview has to deal with was never spoken of to begin with, some say.
Randy Mills, a STEM/Technology teacher at Rangeview, admits that he, along with other staff, found out in a meeting by accident that Rangeview would lose practice fields as a result of the new Mrachek.
“If we didn’t find out about this before, the plan would’ve continued and the district would’ve completely disregarded us,” said Mills.
Rangeview was given a few ideas to fix the problem but nothing was certain as the district was very unresponsive, according to some. Subsequently, ideas had to come up during spring season in order to conduct proper practices, get kids to those practices and keep the programs going.
Mills remarked, “Instead of saying ‘Here’s what’s happening, here are some solutions for you,’ Rangeview was told, ‘Here’s what’s going to happen; deal with it.’”
On the other hand, Victor Strouse, an athletic director at Rangeview, claims that lights are proposed to be placed on the turf at Rangeview which will help lacrosse and other programs practice later in the day.
“A new Mrachek is needed,” claimed Strouse. “That school has been an eyesore for a long time, for Mrachek it’s great. For Rangeview High School, it creates challenges, but challenges that we can handle.”
Ultimately, the $300 million bond was implemented to help out students in the long run; therefore, Rangeview athletes and coaches affected by this can only wait to see the results.
For more information on the reconstruction and the APS bond, visit: http://aurorak12.org/category/bond/
