By Kirk Ross
In the winter, when the leaves are gone there’s 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.
This time of year, you can’t see it at all, but you know it’s there, especially around recess time when the Scroggs Frogs are out on the playground. It’s little louder than a murmur, but shy of a din – a hundred or so children at a time letting loose just through woods.
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.
We’re in different neighborhoods. I’m 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’s where we all vote. I always enjoy telling people that I’m one of the few people who walks through the woods and jumps a creek to get to the polls. Since we’re one of the town’s larger precincts the walkway to the school is usually full of candidates and supporters, and it’s always strange to come through the woods and encounter a phalanx of politicos.
Mary Scroggs Elementary School isn’t just special to me because it’s my neighbor and where I vote. I watched it grow from a site to a school. It’s one of the first stories I covered after becoming a school reporter in 1997. I wrote about it a lot – 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.
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.
Last Friday I was out on the deck listening to the kids play for a while. I’d gone inside and was working on a piece for The Citizen when I heard a siren get close and then stop. I didn’t think much of it. The southernmost Chapel Hill fire station is not far away. Then about 20 minutes later I heard the helicopter.
The occasional helicopter isn’t that unusual in my neighborhood either. We’re 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’d heard a siren and then a helicopter.
My mind flashed back to the times I’ve had to cover something awful occurring at a school. I’ll 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.
I’ve 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.
Right now, I’m just another neighbor worried about the little ones and their parents and what they went through over this long weekend.
And as soon as this column is done, I’m 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.
Thanks for this Kirk. I think we’ve all learned that there is no way to truly understand or prevent tragedies like this, even in idyllic Chapel Hill. When they happen, our consolation is in coming together and remembering the value of connections in a community. You really captured this.
Kirk – You’ve written a beautiful piece. Both of my kids walked in and out of those doors at Scroggs as have so many others. This school a real mixing pot of cultures, ethnicities, socio-economics – now overlain with real-world violence.
Just feeling sad about this event and appreciative of this article and the responses it has received. I hope that the children of Scroggs Elementary are still feeling safe in their fine school despite this terrible incident.