To the Editor:

To the residents of the Northampton Area School District, I wanted to keep you posted on the status of Moore Elementary School and the costly and unsafe $80 million Route 329 and Seemsville Road school complex.

Here’s a little bit of history. In 2023, seven incumbent school board members voted to close Moore Elementary School and build a costly education center among the numerous warehouses on Route 329 instead. To justify the decision to the Pennsylvania Department of Education, they claimed four buildings, including Moore Elementary, must be closed because of their condition.

However, closer to the Nov. 7, 2023, election, four incumbents running for reelection decided closing Moore Elementary was a bad idea because their constituents were against it, especially in this economy. Voters were adamant that building a “Taj Mahal” on Route 329 and Seemsville Road was foolish.

Despite the fact that they voted to close Moore Elementary, the incumbents - Gogel, Mentzell, Becker and Baird - put on a “dog and pony show,” promising to keep Moore Elementary open. Large signs, campaign literature, Halloween floats and meaningless straw votes were taken to deceive the voters.

The voters elected three new board members, including Brian McCulloch, Josh Harris and Kristin Lorah-Soldridge. Longtime board members David Gogel and Robert Mentzell were tossed out of office. The newly elected board members are solidly behind keeping Moore open and scrapping the Route 329 school project.

With the votes of Kim Bretzik and Doug Vaughn, who voted against a new school and closing Moore, we thought we had the majority to overturn the foolish direction of the old board.

We were wrong. Why? There are two reasons.

One week after the election, the old board voted to push the $80 million boondoggle through. We pleaded with them to leave the decision to the new board, but they refused and voted to award the bids for the project.

Doug Vaughn flipped. The newly elected board members and Kim Bretzik tried to stop the project, but the current president, Doug Vaughn, flipped. How disappointed we were after he had stated “no new school” to many voters in his region.

We were so disappointed in Mr. Vaughn. We should not have believed him. He actually voted to put the project up for bid in the only vote that counted before the election.

The residents cannot afford the kind of tax increases that go with building new. We still owe on the middle school and just started to pay on the new 2021 Lehigh Township school.

All this, and our school enrollment has decreased. Experts hired by the school district projected our enrollment will continue to decline.

The reckless decisions of the old board will put us and those who come after us in debt for the next 40-plus years.

What’s next? We’ll keep you posted.

Maggie Kemp

East Allen Township