Attention Ellis Middle School bus drivers, parents, teachers, administrators and others watch out – detour ahead.

Tuesday, August 31, 1999

Attention Ellis Middle School bus drivers, parents, teachers, administrators and others watch out – detour ahead.

A major artery for traffic to and through Austin, 4th Ave. SE, is still closed to traffic.

It outlets traffic to U.S. Highway 218 South, serves Grace Lutheran Church and hundreds of residents in the area and runs right by the largest single school in the Austin Public Schools system.

As of today, access to the school is limited to the entrance past Bethlehem Free Methodist Church, but they expect to have the semi-circle open by Thursday. Imagine the congestion of school buses, parents’ vehicles, school employees’ vehicles, visitors’ vehicles and vendors’ vehicles too, if they didn’t.

Would a new kind of safety patrol be needed to ensure the safety of pedestrians and others?

Street improvements are necessary and Austin residents have seen their share of inconvenience caused by them this summer. Knowing that they are, indeed, an important enhancement of life in the community, the inconvenienced residents, all taxpayers to be sure, grin and bear it.

Nobody is grinning near Ellis Middle School this summer.

This was the same project jinxed long ago, when a crew severed a natural gas line, causing Austin Utilities to contract the repair out so as not to delay their own ongoing projects.

July’s frequent rains could be another reason for the delay.

But that was yesterday and this is today. School is only two days away.

Something went wrong here, and residents have a right to be irate. Good that the city is making its best effort to get the work taken care of as fast as possible.

Not as good, though, that as fast as possible is so slow.