Tired of the parade of cars ferrying children to and from a nearby elementary school, homeowners in a Douglas County, Colo., development decided to fight fire with fire.
Highlands Ranch residents parked their cars on both sides of the street leading to Summit View Elementary School, snarling traffic and creating what county school officials said was a hazardous obstacle course. Police responded to last month’s “park in” by posting no-parking signs in front of the 684-student school, and a committee of school officials, community representatives, and planners is seeking a solution. That could mean building a second road to serve the school.
Douglas County was the nation’s fastest-growing county from 1990 to 1995.
District officials say they are frustrated by parents who still drive their children to school even though they live nearby. Denny Hill, the planning director for the district, said he asked one parent at a recent meeting why her children didn’t walk to school. Her answer: The traffic made it unsafe.
“It’s the ultimate Catch-22,” Mr. Hill said.
Some Cleveland teachers will head to class this week for a crash course on local history as part of the city’s bicentennial bash.
The teachers will spend a day immersed in a new 1,200-page edition of the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. It chronicles the adventures, mysteries, tragedies, and triumphs of the people who have settled on this patch of Ohio marshland at the edge of Lake Erie.
“Cleveland has a rich history that is not known outside of the city,” said John J. Grabowski, a professor of history at the city’s Case Western Reserve University, which produced the new encyclopedia.
All 3,000 copies of the book’s first edition, published in 1980, were sold before they reached bookstores.
Mr. Grabowski said the book’s popularity, in part, is because it is filled with intriguing tales, including the serial murders in the 1930s in which body parts were found buried across the city. Even Eliot Ness, who became Cleveland’s safety director after working for the U.S. Department of Justice to capture gangster Al Capone, couldn’t solve the grisly crimes.
--Drew Lindsay & Jessica Portner
