Wanna Buy a School?

Imagine house hunting and finding a 30,000-square-foot, four-story 1924 home, with a stocked library, 13 bedrooms, two offices, a ridiculous kitchen, walk-in fridge, eight bathrooms, a stage and a basketball court. 

Pricetag? $119,000. 

I stumbled across this gem on eBay while waiting for a softball game that I thought would get rained out (we ended up losing, in the rain, 15-14 after being up 12-0 in the second inning. Thanks for bringing it up). It’s a former Catholic school in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania. 

The limits of what you could do with a home (okay, building) like this are practically immeasurable. Hold a basketball tournament in your living room? Check. Host a family of boarding school children after a war breaks out near their home? Check. Cook and serve dinner for 100 guests? Check. Put on a live production of Macbeth, complete with authentic witches? Check. Start VanTuyl’s Boot Camp for Newsies, an all-inclusive school for would-be journalists? Check.

That’s all well and good except, as I mentioned earlier, that particular building is on the block in somewhere called Mount Carmel, Penn. As everyone knows, the only good things to come out of the Penn state were the Liberty Bell, Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game and chocolate. 

There aren’t any schools that I know of for sale in Lewis County but, if there were, the closest comparison would be the St. Joseph Catholic School off Cascade in Chehalis. 

Seeking a comparison, I looked up the tax info on the St. Joseph School in Chehalis. 

According to our county assessor’s nifty PATS program, I learned that the property owned by the school (JUST the school, not the church) is assessed at $295,000 and the improvements are worth $1.8 million. The building, built in 1922 (according to tax records), looks to be about 13,000 square feet and sit on 1.74 acres. 

That’s not counting the actual church building and land which, built in the 1950s, is assessed for just over $400,000. 

On a somewhat related, but timely, note, we ran a story on page 12 of The Chronicle’s main section today about a former high school building in Mabton that developers are trying to turn into a wine bistro/bed and breakfast/retail center.

A side note: I’ve written a story about former schools and their post-student lives before and, rather than write a full update, I’ll include here everything that’s changed in that portion of my beat since: Vader had a school. Now it doesn’t. Castle Rock absorbed the district, took its assets, and demolished the school building. The end. 

In other news, former Senate candidate Ted Shannon’s long lost brother was found playing for the Houston Astros.

Here’s some more good stuff I didn’t want to leave out. A 9-year-old Little League baseball player in Connecticut has been kicked out of the league he’s in because he throws too hard (40 mph). Way to go, Connecticut. You’ve ousted Vader as the worst place in America to grow up.