School open houses, for the most part, begin today.

This is a chance to meet teachers, principals, sign up for the PTA and make sure your child has all the necessary supplies.

For a complete listing, see the Durham Public Schools list.

The Durham Public Schools have now posted their bus routes to the district's Web site.

(This should come as relief to some of the parents who have been panicking about not knowing what they were.)

Transportation Director Scott Denton warns, though, that the bus routes continue to be tweaked throughout the school year, mostly in the first two months of school, because of new students registering for school or deciding to ride the bus.

Other handy information, from high school schedule checks to dress codes, and from supply lists to athletic participation forms, are also available at the district's back-to-school Web site.

The traffic clogs on Main and Broad streets, the jam-packed sports utility vehicles and bleary-eyed and weary parents are the telltale signs that another Durham summer ritual is underway.

The Duke University freshmen are moving in to East Campus residence halls.
Most of these students about to jump into college life were born in 1990, a year when rising fuel prices were forcing airlines to make cuts and a different President Bush was sending troops to the Middle East.

Beloit College in Wisconsin, which for the past 11 years has released an annual College Mindset List, noted the similarities in today’s headlines.
Tom McBride, a humanities professor at Beloit, and Ron Nief, the public affairs director, also had this to say about the almost 2 million first-year students who head off to college campuses this month.
The mindset of the class of 2012, the list creators say, is very different from the freshmen of 1990.

An innovative plan for the Ninth Street area that has been two years in the making is going to take at least another 60 days.

Durham City Council voted 7-0 Monday to continue its hearing on the plan after property owners holding 60 percent of the area involved complained the plan amounted to a downzoning, and would cut their property values in half.

The nine local college students who spent seven weeks in Ghana earlier this summer had little choice but to chat each other up into the wee hours.

It was almost too warm to sleep.

Said Ally Bell, a rising Duke senior:

    "It was really, really hot. All the time. It was hot at night, and hot during the day. We didn't have air conditioning. We had fans that were on a 60-minute rotation, so every 60 minutes someone had to get up and turn it back on."

A controversial sewage pumping station on polluted Lick Creek got sent back to the drawing board this morning by Durham's Development Review Board.

Lick Creek is in far-eastern Durham County and flows into Falls Lake, reservoir for the city of Raleigh.

City/County planning director Steve Medlin said there was no date set for a re-hearing. The earliest the pumping station plan could come back for development review is Sept. 5.

N.C. Central University Chancellor Charlie Nelms said Friday his institution is still in talks with the UNC system about the repercussions from an unauthorized satellite campus NCCU recently stopped operating at a suburban Atlanta megachurch.

The saga surrounding the collection of degree programs NCCU offered for four years at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Ga. received just a passing mention Friday during at telephone conference meeting of the executive committee of the university's board of trustees.

You may remember about a year ago at this time when N.C. Central University Chancellor Charlie Nelms, the new guy in town having just arrived the previous month, got some people's attention by helping students move into their new dorm rooms.

You don't remember? Shame on you. Read this. Watch this.

Well, Nelms was back at it again this week, lugging dorm fridges and suitcases up nine flights of stairs. I caught up with him today, a couple days removed from his moving-day cardio workout.

How does he feel?

"I'll tell you what!" he said. "I didn't know I had some of these muscles. Nine flights of stairs isn't an easy thing to do. But it's exciting to get a chance to meet students and their parents."

Here is the list of projects to be funded by the proposed 1 percent prepared-food tax.

A committee of city and county officials approved the list last Tuesday; it has yet to be approved by the city council and board of county commissioners.

Items with two start dates indicate two different phases.

(The list did not appear earlier because of technical difficulties. It is now attached.) 

Documents:

A stretch of Pickett Road that has been closed for about a week now will remain so through late November, an engineer with the state Department of Transportation said today.

The DOT is replacing a 400-foot stretch of bridge on Pickett Road running over Mud Creek, which is near Pine View Circle on the western end of Pickett Road, said engineer Cadmus Capehart. The project is expected to last until Nov. 21, and the road will be closed until then. Capehart added that, as of July 31, the work was ahead of schedule.

The road closing is a hindrance for residents of western Durham near the Orange County line, since that section of Pickett Road is the most direct way for many folks there to get out to U.S. 15-501 via Garrett Road.

A detour sends motorists along Erwin and Cornwallis roads.