
{"id":26198,"date":"2012-05-31T10:30:46","date_gmt":"2012-05-31T14:30:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=26198"},"modified":"2012-06-01T13:36:56","modified_gmt":"2012-06-01T17:36:56","slug":"big-city-when-helicopters-hover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2012\/05\/31\/big-city-when-helicopters-hover\/","title":{"rendered":"BIG CITY: When helicopters hover"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Kirk Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In the winter, when the leaves are gone there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no missing the light-blue roof. From the deck off the room where I write, you can see it easily, and at night you can also see the lights inside the building shining through the big window at the end of the second-floor hallway.<\/p>\n<p>This time of year, you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t see it at all, but you know it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s there, especially around recess time when the Scroggs Frogs are out on the playground. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s little louder than a murmur, but shy of a din \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a hundred or so children at a time letting loose just through woods.<\/p>\n<p>The Fan Branch runs through those woods, and if I want to walk up to the market I have to hop over it. I usually do so at the bend where an old log is the sitting bench at a wooded retreat favored by the local teens.<\/p>\n<p>We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in different neighborhoods. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m in the old one full of brick ranches, old trees and big yards. The school is in the new one, with its new urbanism mix of condos, apartments and big contemporary homes on compact lots. Our neighborhoods are different, but the school brings us together. Not only do the kids from each place come together to mingle and play, but every Election Day it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s where we all vote. I always enjoy telling people that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m one of the few people who walks through the woods and jumps a creek to get to the polls. Since we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re one of the town\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s larger precincts the walkway to the school is usually full of candidates and supporters, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s always strange to come through the woods and encounter a phalanx of politicos.<\/p>\n<p>Mary Scroggs Elementary School isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just special to me because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s my neighbor and where I vote. I watched it grow from a site to a school. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s one of the first stories I covered after becoming a school reporter in 1997. I wrote about it a lot \u00e2\u20ac\u201c everything from its architecture to how many kids would be in each classroom. When the district briefly considered a public-private partnership for it, the paper even flew me out to Kansas to cover a similar setup.<\/p>\n<p>One day just before the school opened, I walked into the media center and there was Mary Scroggs herself, sitting at a desk helping get the books ready for the library shelves. She made me promise not to make a big deal out of it; she just wanted to be another volunteer in the school that was named for her.<\/p>\n<p>Last Friday I was out on the deck listening to the kids play for a while. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d gone inside and was working on a piece for The Citizen when I heard a siren get close and then stop. I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think much of it. The southernmost Chapel Hill fire station is not far away. Then about 20 minutes later I heard the helicopter.<\/p>\n<p>The occasional helicopter isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that unusual in my neighborhood either. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re on a flight path to UNC Hospitals used by the life flight chopper. But this one was hovering, and the second I realized that, my heart sank. The only time a helicopter hovering over this town is not an indication something bad has happened is during basketball season or on graduation weekend. This one was right overhead. I dialed up the WRAL website and suddenly knew why I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d heard a siren and then a helicopter.<\/p>\n<p>My mind flashed back to the times I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve had to cover something awful occurring at a school. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll never forget standing at the bottom of the entrance to Culbreth once. interviewing frightened parents and sobbing students. All the while a helicopter was overhead, just as it was last Friday as the Scroggs community gathered up its children.<\/p>\n<p>I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve nothing profound to say about all this or how we can work to stop such things from happening again. I just know that we have to try.<\/p>\n<p>Right now, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m just another neighbor worried about the little ones and their parents and what they went through over this long weekend.<\/p>\n<p>And as soon as this column is done, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to walk out on the deck and wait for recess and the sounds of all those little Frogs at play coming through the woods.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the deck off the room where I write, you can see it easily, and at night you can also see the lights inside the building shining through the big window at the end of the second-floor hallway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26198"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26277,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26198\/revisions\/26277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}