YOU WON”T HAVE TO dunk your dog in the tub at home for a bath, as a new dog-washing facility has been approved for the Central Park in Huntington Beach (Flickr/Aaron Anderer).

If you’ve got a dirty dog and don’t care to mess up your bathtub with fur and water, you will soon have an alternative. At its meeting on Monday night, the Huntington Beach City Council approved an agreement which will bring canine-laundering to the Central Park.

On a 7-0 vote, the council approved a license and operating agreement with Spas for Paws, LLC for a new self-service dog washing facility at the Central Park (located at Goldenwest Street and Talbert Avenue) for a term of five years.

To be located near to the existing dog area at the southwest corner of the park, the facility will be about 100 square feet in area and the surface will be 11 inches high. It will be similar to a self-serve car wash, using a cashless vending machine.

GGPD giving DUI drivers fair warning

This holiday season, Garden Grove Police Department is partnering with the California Office of Traffic Safety, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and law enforcement nationwide for the Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over enforcement campaign to help keep impaired drivers off the road. The campaign started on Dec.  15, 2017 and will continue through Jan. 1, 2018.

Motorists cab  expect to see DUI/Drivers License checkpoints and law enforcement increase patrols looking for drunk or drug impaired drivers. If they catch you driving, you will be pulled over and arrested.
According to NHTSA, 37,461 people were killed in motor vehicle traffic crashes in 2016, and 28 percent (10,497) of those fatalities were in crashes during which a driver had a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) over the legal limit of .08.

High scores for the GGUSD

The California Department of Education recently promoted the first official results of the state’s new school performance and accountability website, the California School Dashboard.  Garden Grove Unified School District received high rankings in many categories including academic growth, graduation rates, student attendance, and more.

The California School Dashboard was designed to provide parents with an easy-to-read tool with information about schools across the state.  The dashboard displays five color-coded performance levels with GGUSD ranking green, the second highest rating, for graduation rates, English Learner progress, English Language Arts, and Mathematics test scores for third through eighth grades.  The dashboard shows GGUSD’s chronic absenteeism at 7.4 percent lower than the Orange County rate of 8.3 percent and California rate of 10.8 percent.

The California Dashboard replaces the more narrowly-defined Academic Performance Index by providing multiple measures of school success. It also allows the public to compare schools and districts.

The Dashboard was launched as a communication tool aligned to California’s new school accountability system based on 2013’s Local Control Funding Formula.  It was first publicized as a field test last year.