PENDLETON, OR — The line of idling minivans waiting to release children into Sherwood Heights Elementary stretched past the Tastee-Freez Tuesday morning, around the bend at Court Place, and ended somewhere in the vicinity of a muffler shop, which a sergeant on traffic detail described as “honestly kind of impressive.”
The first day of school in Pendleton has been a slowly worsening situation for fourteen consecutive Augusts, and on Tuesday the Pendleton Police Department, in the form of Officer Doug Reinholt, conceded the field. Reinholt, who has worked drop-off detail since 2011, said he and his partner have stopped issuing warnings for the rolling stop at the four-way and are now, in his words, “essentially just here for waving.”
“We could write paper all day,” Reinholt said, nodding at a Honda Odyssey whose driver was applying mascara at the wheel. “We have decided to instead just be present.”
Principal Lacey Morrissette had sent a six-paragraph email Sunday night asking parents to please, please use the back lot off Bailey Avenue. By 7:42 a.m. Tuesday, the back lot off Bailey Avenue contained one vehicle, a 2003 Subaru, parked correctly. The front line by then included a school bus, three Amazon vans that had somehow merged in, and a man on an electric scooter who said he was “just seeing what was going on.”
At the Tastee-Freez, manager Brenda Halsey said the morning rush has tripled since the city’s “no idling within fifty feet of the school marquee” rule went unenforced for the third consecutive August. “I am selling cake-batter shakes at 7:50 a.m. to grown adults in pajama pants,” Halsey said. “I have my opinions about it.”
Travis Boudreau, in line since 7:18 with his second-grade daughter Maple and a thermos of coffee his wife had filled “for emergencies,” was, at 7:51, on his second cup. “She’s in second grade,” Boudreau said, looking at the dashboard clock. “By the time we get there she’s going to be in third.”
Mayor Carl Whittaker, asked Tuesday afternoon whether the city had a plan for next year, said the city had a plan for last year and would be revisiting it. That plan, per public records, is a laminated diagram of suggested traffic flow that has hung on the back of the cafeteria door since 2019 and that one parent in line reached for the phrase “more of a vibe than a map” to describe.
Mrs. Hennessey, a fifth-grade teacher at Sherwood Heights since 1998, watched Tuesday’s procession from the front steps with a travel mug and offered the only assessment that seemed to settle the matter. “It used to end at the post office,” she said. “Now it ends wherever it wants.”