Not too Street Smart

[Joe Guy]

Shcool Zone

NYC School Misspelling Causes Red Faces, Pointed Fingers (ABC News)

The Department of Transportation claims the mistake was made by a utility provider conducting repairs on the street, according to The New York Post, which first reported the glaring error.

City officials say utility providers and contractors are responsible for returning city streets back to normal after repairs.

But at least one city worker told the paper the blame lies not with the utility company or the city, but with the school.

"Regardless of who painted it, someone from the school should have been outside supervising, or noticed it by now," the city worker, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Post. "This is sloppy work."

The Post also reports that the neighborhood's residents said construction crews worked on the street over the summer, meaning the error has gone either unnoticed or unrepaired by both the city and the school for months.

"What's ironic is that the principal has probably painted the lunchroom and rooms inside over about five times since 2010," Marta Valle's PTA president Linda Surles told the Post. "She's probably spent $100,000 in paint doing and redoing the inside of the school, but she doesn't notice this right outside her door!"

Officials from Marta Valle High had no comment.

The Post's inquiries were enough though, it seems, to get the error fixed.

"We are contacting them to correct the error promptly," a DOT spokesman told the Post, referring to the utility provider the agency says is to blame. The mistake has since been corrected.

[Scooter]

The worker from the city is an idiot. The school is responsible for supervising work that is conducted outside on a city street? And was someone from the city going to provide someone to supervise the classroom full of kids that would have otherwise gone unsupervised while a staff member stood outside babysitting the contractors?

[BoSoxGal]

What's really sad is that I'm sure there were at least a few street signs around that designated this a 'school zone' which the workers could have copied.

But in any event, it's not terribly surprising that it took so long to be noticed - most folks aren't consciously reading the street paint, and even if they were, it's been well established in the literature that the human mind doesn't read words letter by letter - the people reading it probably just assumed it was correct because their minds understood what it was meant to say.