While there are at least three lawsuits working their way through the court system to stop the city from building a water filtration plant at Mosholu Golf Course in Van Cortlandt Park, site preparation work has already begun. Archaeologists have begun digging to check for historic remains, the driving range has already been moved, and trees appear to have been marked for removal.

After a four-year journey, it all ends with a “Goosebumps” book in Dimitri Rhooms’ hand. Ten-year-old Dimitri and his fellow PS 94 classmates are the beneficiaries of a spacious, brand-new school library made possible with funding from the Robin Hood Foundation.

Call it musical restraining orders. At different points over the last six weeks, two different lawsuits fighting the city’s plan to build a water filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park succeeded in stays being issued to prevent work on the project.

Fordham University has begun clearing the necessary hurdles to build a new radio antenna on a Norwood apartment building for its public radio station, WFUV. If successful, Fordham would finally put an end to a decade of controversy, which began when it started to construct a tower on its campus, which infuriated its institutional neighbor, the New York Botanical Garden.

It will be a while before we know how many people voted in our area, but as we write this on Tuesday afternoon, anecdotal evidence suggests that, like many other places in the city and the country, voter turnout is higher than it’s been since the 1960s.

It was bad enough Mayor Bloomberg vetoed sensible legislation to ban the installation of car alarms in New York City. Now, he has actually vetoed a bill that would ban the sale of those small, motorized scooters that plagued our neighborhoods over the summer.

In April of 1999, during the war in Kosovo, the Serbian police and military forced my family and me out of our apartment in Prishtina. As we were on the bus fleeing toward the Macedonian border, I remember looking back one last time and wondering if I would ever come back again. It turned out that it wouldn’t be until five years later that I would be ready to go back to the place where I had spent the first 23 years of my life.

Rampant school overcrowding and insufficient cafeteria food were the focus of a recent meeting of the District 10 Community Education Council, which replaced the old school boards this fall. Members drilled regional representative Joel DiBartolomeo on school and district-wide issues during the business portion of the Oct. 21 meeting, held in the beautiful new library of North Fordham’s PS 46.

While the school year has just begun, it’s already time for parents of fifth graders to look ahead to the next big leap – middle school. This is an especially crucial choice, as a positive middle school experience is key to children’s development. What follows are some helpful tips for navigating the range of choices available to you.