December 2002 - January 2003 Edition

High School and Its Neighbors by Matt Greenfield This is a great and hopeful story of reconciliation. It is the tale of a community once divided, now harmonious; once fractured by the poor behavior of the few, now made friendly by the détente of the whole. A year ago, around this time, no secret was made of the growing tensions between Fair Lawn High School and those residents whose homes neighbor it. Any passerby on Orchard Street may have seen a score of students loitering on the sidewalks in front of the houses there. The neighbors closest to the high school may have returned home from work on a given day to find a pile of cigarette butts beside the curb. Any local resident who chose to attend a meeting of the Borough Council would have found themselves among a multitude of querulous homeowners, telling stories of litter and rudeness of the students. Today, the litter in front of Fair Lawn High School is no more abounding than anywhere else in town. Neighbors on Orchard, Lexington, Burbank, Fairclough, and Berdan find no loiterers outside of their houses. Borough Council meetings are again dominated by substantive issues, not by petty differences between students and nearby residents. What is the reason for the sudden change in the environment around the school? Some will insist that the change came as a result of a year-old ordinance prohibiting parking on Orchard Street during school hours. If this was the reason, however, we must ask ourselves why the situation has remedied itself on adjacent streets, where students continue to park their cars. The original tensions resulted, indirectly, from legislation on a state level which prohibited smoking on school grounds. As Fair Lawn High School’s smoking population was driven out of the parking lot, where smoking had been allowed, they reverted to smoking on streets surrounding the school. Over the past summer, the Borough Council passed an ordinance providing that, on public property within a given distance from a school, smoking would be illegal. This stripped the smokers of the option to smoke in front of neighboring homes, fending off the littering and loitering in the area. In the coming months, the ordinance concerning parking on Orchard Street is up for renewal. When Fair Lawn considers the fairness of stripping parking availability from its students, we must keep in mind that enabling student parking on Orchard Street could never lead to the restoration of littering and loitering. So long as smoking is illegal across the street from Fair Lawn High School, those neighbors who live nearby need never to worry about finding cigarette butts on their lawns. So long as the smoking population of students has no reason to congregate on Orchard Street, its residents will never find litter on their lawns. Yes, this is a great and hopeful story of reconciliation. It is great, because of the phenomenon of the compromises which both the school and its neighbors have made to reach concord; hopeful, because the potential has never died for complete harmony to thrive within this community.   See Matt Greenfield's Previous Column Support The Referendum (October 2002)