MAINE – For a few years, a Maine coon cat, whose name was Two-Face, would cross Summer Street to visit students at the playground at C.K. Burns elementary school.
The four-legged friend was, as Burns School Principal Lila Mitchell explains it, “a part of the school community.”
“She’d always been an outside cat,” explained the cat’s owner, Ted Sirois, who also is a member of the Saco school board.
He went on to say that his kids named her Two Face because the coloring on one side of her face was different from the other side, and she looked like two different cats when viewed from the side.
Two Face died last Wednesday after being hit by a car while making her regular journey to Burns School.
Her family, which had her for a total of 10 years, is devastated.
“She was fantastic,” Sirois stated.
The loss also reverberated throughout Burns School, which educates grades three to five. And it’s now causing police to examine traffic in the area.
Mitchell explained that Two-Face was a friendly, beautiful cat who was adored by the students. She stated that the cat would always show up when the students were outside and had been known to take a nap in the back seat of a school staff member’s car if the windows happened to be open.
Sirois stated that new traffic patterns caused by changes to school start times this year played a part in Two Face’s demise.
“Two-Face had been making this trek across Summer Street for years without any problems,” he commented in a letter to the Journal Tribune. “Unfortunately, things have changed since the last school year.”
With the new school schedule, buses are traveling during peak traffic hours, and more drivers are using Winter, Middle and Summer streets in order to avoid traffic lights at the corner of Beach and Main streets.
There are also a number of people who are speeding down those side streets and not honoring posted speed limits of 25 mph, Sirois said.
As a school board member, he stated, he’s gotten many complaints about traffic problems with the new busing schedule, and he believes Summer Street, which runs alongside C.K. Burns School, should be a designated school zone.
Meanwhile, Two-Face will be sorely missed by all who knew her.
The Sirois family received a handmade card from one of the students with a thoughtful note saying that her entire class was sad.
The student said when she heard the news, she couldn’t stop crying and wasn’t able to sing in music class
And she now hates Wednesdays.
“The kids [at the school] got quite attached to her,” concluded Sirois.
