City Councilman Bruce Kilby squeezed into Holly Holland’s driveway, the tailgate of his white pickup not quite off the street.

But there was nowhere else to park. There never is when school lets out on Clifton Avenue at Harris-Jackson elementary school. And on this typical Thursday afternoon last week, the 20 minutes of organized dismissal chaos was just beginning.

Dozens of students boarded six yellow buses. A few started the walk home. But most of the school’s 570 students looked for their parents. They live within two miles of Akron’s newest elementary school and, therefore, are not bused.

As with other large elementary schools recently rebuilt in Akron's residential neighborhoods, parents who can't find parking clog nearby streets up to an hour before dismissal. Neighbors have complained that the congestion “traps” them in their driveways. So they called in their councilman, who doesn’t shy from confrontation.

Kilby stepped off Holland’s front porch and walked toward the chaos to demand relief for his constituents, telling cars to move, warning drivers that they would get tickets and shouting with a school administrator. Parents, school staff and children later told police of Kilby's “skulking” and “hollering” and “pounding” on car windows.

The Akron police officer who listened to witnesses filed Kilby’s behavior as disorderly conduct and menacing. But Lt. Rick Edwards, a spokesman for Akron police, said authorities aren't charging the councilman, who received a warning letter from the school district. If he returns unannounced or fails to sign in at the school's main office, Kilby will be treated under Ohio law as a trespasser, wrote Dan Rambler, head of student support and security. “[And] the Akron Board of Education will prosecute all intruders.”

Kilby, who accused a school administrator of “instigating the whole thing,” said “it’s all a bunch of BS.” He disputed witness statements from three administrators, a school bus driver, a student, a mother, a grandmother and a woman who doesn’t speak English but told an interpreter that she wept “when he yelled at me.”

Her son, a student at the elementary school, later told police that “when I saw [Kilby] I was scared and then he knocked on the window. When I saw my mom cry, I said, ‘why are you crying?’ She said she was mad.”

Principal Andrea Aller told police Kilby crouched down to “yell” at a mother trying to get her toddler and baby out of their car seats so she could retrieve her other child from the school. “He appeared disheveled and based on his behavior, I wondered if he was drunk or high,” Aller said. “I had read his business card when he first handed it to me, but I didn’t think it was really Councilman Kilby because I didn’t think a councilman would behave the way this guy [was] behaving.”

To some residents across the street, Kilby looked like part of the solution, not the problem.

“And, truthfully, he’s been the only one who’s tried,” Holland said in a phone interview Thursday. “I’ve contacted the school principal, who says it’s not the school’s problem. The police come up, but they don’t tell anyone to move and they don’t get out of their cruisers.”

Notwithstanding Kilby’s timing (in the middle of an already chaotic dismissal) or his alleged behavior, the councilman’s actions have drawn attention to a traffic issue surrounding many of Akron’s newer elementary and middle schools.

The traffic is the result of busy schools built large per state funding requirements. School and district officials have struggled to manage the high-volume traffic. And parents are less likely to let their kids walk these days. As for the signs Kilby pointed to when telling drivers they would be ticketed, the city was supposed to take those down months ago.

Akron Public Schools received state money to replace most of its buildings. But the state didn’t want the same small neighborhood schools of previous generations. For efficiency purposes, funding was tied to larger plans that consolidated old neighborhood schools.

According to property records, the 35,000-square-foot Harris-Jackson Elementary built in 2017 is more than twice the size of the school it replaced in North Hill. Parking was built for staff, with little onsite room left for parents.

“I get the frustration,” said Rambler, who added that there's been “an evolution in our society in the way parents now prefer to drive their kids to school.” Rambler gets that, too. Parents don’t let kids walk through neighborhoods with “unsavory” characters like registered sex offenders, he said.

Whether they have made a difference, accommodations have been made to ease the flow of traffic.

On the day after the school was dedicated, a sign went up letting drivers know that Clifton Avenue would be one-way during pickup and drop-off. Rambler hired Tenable Protective Services Inc., which was used when Litchfield Middle School temporarily squeezed into old Perkins School, to help parents stay in their lanes.

“[But] parents often ignore the cones,” said Holland. “They do what they want and ignore all that.”

And Kilby said police often stay in their cruisers. Lately, they've been preoccupied by student fights at Jennings Middle and North High School, which are in the same cluster. Rambler confirmed students targeting students this past week at the two schools.

And then there are the “no parking” signs. Akron’s traffic engineering department said in a May 2018 email to the school district that the signs would be replaced on the east side of Clifton Avenue so drivers and residents know that it's OK to park there during student pickup and dropoff.

Apparently, nobody told Kilby it was cool to park there.

Reach Doug Livingston at dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3792.