"I understand there was a lot of horn blowing at the intersection," said Lt. Charles Lowery Jr., school patrol supervisor for the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office. "The public just needs to chill out for a minute and let us do our job instead of calling us and complaining and griping because they're not getting through as fast as they used to."

"We're brand-new, but we have to act as if we'd been open for a long time," she said. "People have choices, and they could go somewhere else."

East Hamilton, the district's second middle-high school to open in as many years, has a capacity of 1,650 students, and Ms. [Pam Dantzler] estimated that about 1,600 showed up Wednesday. But because of large classroom sizes and plenty of open space, she said the building could actually hold "considerably more" before the school was overcrowded.

"It's new to everybody right now. So far, so good," he said at about 9:30 a.m. "Of course, we haven't fed them yet."