We love the fact that it is a walking community; we love to walk. We believed our children would walk to school. It turned out too many kids had cars, and they got rides, but we liked the idea they could.
I walk at night and I walk at 6 in the morning when it’s dark, and I still feel safe.
I always show people the high school. There’s this cute story about the kids putting the high school up for sale once on eBay, and you can understand that.
If somebody is coming to visit me from out of town, they say, “Oh, Shaker Heights, very toity.”
I think people probably say, “Why do you pay the taxes to live in Shaker?” And I can tell you that I think the education my children received and the services we get as taxpayers have outweighed the pain of taxes.
You don’t have to travel very far for anything you need.
Our daughter is currently teaching elementary special ed in the Bronx. And I really credit Mr. Huchinson, the vice principal of Shaker Heights High School.
We moved here from the city of Syracuse, N.Y., and it was very diverse. We think of Shaker as an urban community, too. We like that. It’s really healthy for your kids when they go to school, because your children learn how to get along with everybody, because everybody is not the same as them, and we think that’s a real plus.
People who grew up here return to raise their family. I think that’s great. I come from a place where that didn’t really happen. People either stayed or they went away. People coming back: That says something about a community.
