After the holidays, I get in a clean and purge mood -- closets, pantry, desk, everything. So, here are a few items I found in the pile this week:

An increasing number of states are giving high school students an incentive to graduate early, Education Week reports. New scholarships for early graduates are starting in Idaho, Indiana, Minnesota and South Dakota.

Of course, knocking off a year or even a semester of high school isn't good for all students, or even most students. But think of the potential to short-circuit some of the tedium and senioritis that sets in, even among good, motivated students. Imagine students who had fulfilled all their graduation requirements and could demonstrate a constructive plan for that last semester. They could be enrolled in the next stage of their education or taking more rigorous classes at a nearby college, wherever they chose to go after traditional graduation.

Some school districts, where populations are shrinking, would be sorry to see students leave early because enrollment affects funding. Others, where they can't build classrooms fast enough, would probably welcome a few extra seats. But it shouldn't be a strictly mathematical equation. Schools could make a good case for a program that allows students to advance at their own pace but still requires the school to be in touch with students, advising and monitoring students' progress toward that next goal.

Letting the end point of high school actually depend on when certain academic requirement are met might also help high school diplomas be perceived less as a measure of time served and more as a measure of real knowledge and accomplishment.

***

During the last 10 years the number of children living with their grandparents has increased 50 percent, according to the Brookdale Grandparent Caregiver Information Project in California and reported in "Children's Voice," the magazine of the Child Welfare League of America.

That's 2.6 million grandparents rearing 6 million grandchildren. Another 1.5 million children are in the homes of other relatives. The reasons, not surprisingly, include substance abuse, illness, child abuse and neglect, incarceration, death and domestic violence.

There is a group, Grandfamilies of America, based in Thurmont, Md., grandfamiliesofamerica.org.

***

Did you know that more driveways on a road increase the number of vehicle crashes on that road? So says the winter issue of "Country Roads & City Streets," a newsletter from the Local Technical Assistance Program at WVU that I find strangely fascinating.

People understandably feel a certain communal ownership of their local roads, the newsletter says. They go to meetings and communicate their wishes and preferences to local elected officials, sometimes vociferously.

That's all good, as long as people don't think you can design a safe road by popular vote, the newsletter warns. Road safety is anything but simple. Consider:

• Would everything be better if your road were just widened? Maybe. Wider lanes and wide paved shoulders are associated with a decrease in crashes. But they also lead to an increase in speeds, a whole other issue.

• Just need a stop sign? Maybe, if you need a stop to make an intersection safer. Stop signs intended to slow cars down often don't work because drivers accelerate between stops to make up for lost time.

• Traffic light? It does reduce the number of angle or T-bone crashes, which are often severe or deadly. But traffic lights lead to an increase in rear-end collisions. Because those wrecks are usually not as severe, traffic engineers weigh the type of traffic and volume to decide whether an intersection should have a light.