Students denied dam tour

Terry Webster

Wednesday, Oct. 27, 1999 | 11:56 a.m.

In his poem "Mending Wall," Robert Frost wrote that when building walls he would ask what he "was walling in or walling out."

The same might be asked about the 725-foot Hoover Dam, where 224 Clark County fourth-grade pupils were turned away this month when they showed up for their free educational tours.

School officials from Grant Bowler Elementary School in Logandale and Doris French Elementary School on East Hacienda Avenue said their classes were denied tours of the dam, even though plans were made well in advance. Both groups were told at the gate that they could have a tour, but only if they paid a $2 fee per student.

Neither group had counted on that, so they returned to their schools with buses full of disappointed fourth-graders.

A total of 110 pupils from Grant Bowler took a 90-minute bus ride Oct. 21 to get to the dam, only to be told there was no record of their plans, Principal Ken Ligon said.

And after studying the dam in depth for a week, 114 pupils from Doris French boarded buses for their tour on Oct. 15. They arrived 10 minutes behind schedule and were told they missed the tour; the next one they could attend was at 4 p.m., fourth-grade teacher Mary Rowe said.

"What you have here is a lot of disappointed people," Ligon said. "It's not very good public relations for the Hoover Dam. I hope they do something to rectify it."

Ligon said he is not sure if his students will make a return trip. For Rowe's fourth-graders, however, there is no turning back.

"We paid $300 for the school buses and that was the amount budgeted," she said. "It's done."

Rowe's pupils did go on the picnic they had planned for after the tour.

"The kids kept asking if we were going to go back," she said.

In years past this kind of problem never occurred, Rowe said.

"We've been doing this every year," she said. "This time, they treated us so rudely. They were outright rude."

Inquiries and complaints about the treatment of the school groups have prompted changes in the way tours are handled, effective immediately, Bob Walsh of the Bureau of Reclamation's external affairs office, said. Walsh called the two incidents abnormal.

"We get two to three school groups per day and around 7,000 per year going through the Hoover Dam without any problems," he said.

Having students tour the dam is important and officials will continue to work with schools, he added.

"Both schools were late, but unfortunately, they were greeted by people who were probably obeying policy, but not the spirit for treating guests," Walsh said. He would not say whether the employees were disciplined.

Walsh said that in the future school groups will receive their tours, even if they arrive late.