Photo from Facebook
During a Lakewood Elementary SBDM committee meeting last night, parents and neighbors of Lakewood Elementary passionately disputed a proposal from Dallas ISD and Verizon to build a cell tower on the Lakewood Elementary School campus, and they won.
The Lakewood Elementary Facebook page noted the outcome: “Thank you to all the parents and staff that made it out to the SBDM meeting tonight. As a community, we made our voices heard and made a difference. The cell tower issue is dead.”
Chris Prestridge, a member of the SBDM board and Lakewood Elementary parent, said the DISD and Verizon representatives were “peppered with questions from about 50 parents.” During the vote, when asked who opposed the cell tower proposal, almost everyone in attendence raised his or her hand.
Yesterday Prestridge explained that the proposal had “flown largely under the radar until Friday.” But once the news was out, parents and neighbors were “up in arms.”
Neighbors were mostly concerned about possible health concerns associated with cell towers, Prestridge said.
“It just seems weird to me to take a building full of young children and hang a device over them that may or may not cause harm,” he pointed out.
The proposed item was discovered in the Dallas ISD 2014-2015 budget (on page 49 under “long-term lease agreements by category.” See “cellular antenna equipment”), which states the district would receive almost $400,000 of annual revenue from this practice. The budget claims to have 16 “active leases” for the year 2014.
You can read the rest of the budget here.
