SHELBY, Ohio–In an effort to encourage more students to walk or bike to school, Shelby’s Board of Education entertained a presentation from Safe Routes to School at their board meeting on Wednesday where they were presented with a possible future transportation plan for Shelby City Schools.
Established in May 2006, the National Center for Safe Routes to School assists states and communities in enabling and encouraging children to safely walk and bicycle to school. Safe Routes to School (SRTS) programs are sustained efforts by parents, schools, community leaders and local, state, and federal governments to improve the health and well-being of children by enabling and encouraging them to walk and bicycle to school.
“We’re trying to get more students to be actively engaged in their transportation,” said Officer Ron Burkitt, a School Resource Officer in Hilliard, Ohio and president of New Day Consulting, which specializes in bike safety, pedestrian safety, school issues and law enforcement.
SRTS programs examine conditions around schools and conduct projects and activities that work to improve safety and accessibility, and reduce traffic and air pollution in the vicinity of schools. As a result, these programs help make bicycling and walking to school safer and more appealing transportation choices, thus encouraging a healthy and active lifestyle from an early age.
Burkitt worked with Jennifer Spinosi, a planner with TranSystems who helps transportation users and providers with their facility and infrastructure goals. Together the two observed the current transportation patterns around four Shelby schools: Dowds Elementary, Auburn Elementary, Shelby Middle School and St. Mary’s School. Burkitt noted SRTS focuses on barriers that hinder and improvements to walking and biking within two miles of K-8 schools.
“The three key terms we’re looking at is where are the kids coming from, how are they getting there and why,” said Burkitt. “The way we gathered that was through student location maps created by the Ohio Department of Transportation, student travel tallies where we asked the students how they got to school, and parent questionnaires to figure out why they do or do not let their kids walk or ride to school.”
From Jan. 5 through March 2, communities can apply for grants for up to $400,000 towards infrastructure projects and $15,000 towards non-infrastructure projects. Burkitt explained in Ohio, 80 percent of project funding would come through the federal government, and 20 percent through the state government.
“There are no funds to come from the local jurisdiction,” said Burkitt. “Funds can be used for both infrastructure and non-infrastructure projects, including education, encouragement, enforcement, engineering and evaluation.”
Burkitt explained education costs could cover campaign materials and informational meetings for parents, as well as “walking school bus” training where a parent volunteer would walk to school, and as they pass other children whose parents don’t want them to walk unsupervised would pick them up, and walk to school in a large group.
Similar to a “walking school bus” would be a “dot-to-dot” program, where kids would walk from one parent to the next all the way to school, so the kids are observed and supervised during their entire walk but parents don’t have to walk all the way to school and back.
For the enforcement component, Burkitt noted dollars could pay for overtime for police officers to enforce school zone limits, ODOT adult school crossing training, and safety vests and other equipment for those assisting with arrival and dismissal around schools.
Burkitt and Spinosi also recommended the following changes around each school: Repaint existing crosswalks in ladder styles, add pedestrian push buttons with countdown timers, add in-road yield to pedestrian signage, adding sidewalks, move bike racks and add additional bike racks, improve pedestrian crossing at railroad tracks, and extend school zones.
The two also suggested moving Auburn’s parent drop-off to the east side of the building, moving Dowds’ parent drop-off and pick-up to the west parking lot and not allowing parents to turn right out of the parking lot, and redirecting the high school traffic to follow Dicks Drive or Plymouth Street instead of using middle school parking lot.
“The whole idea of the program is to introduce these ideas to you folks, and then you talk about them and decide what you want to do,” said Burkitt. “It depends on what parents and constituents want – these are just ideas for how we want to do this, and if we did it what would cost money and how do we put that in a grant application.”
The next step for Burkitt and Spinosi is to incorporate public comments into the final plan to be approved by ODOT in early January, at which point grant applications can be completed and submitted. Spinosi noted that should the grants be accepted, infrastructure projects would be about three years in the future while non-infrastructure dollars could be obtained before the start of the next school year.
“But you’re not going to apply for all of these. You might pick a couple that you really want to be your first projects to get this going, and then say you do find another grant application down the road you want to use to apply for a different project, now you’ve got this document that says these are projects we have identified as priorities for getting kids to school,” she said.
Project Manager Joe Gies for the city of Shelby added the city would work with school administration and prioritize projects in the future. As pointed out by retiring bus driver Lois Hartman, the project ideas are a step in the right direction.
“Whatever you guys decide to do about these grants, it is needed,” said Hartman. “But maybe if you start out small and once the public and people of the community get a feel for it, they will be more interested in helping out with some of that. You’ve got to start somewhere.”
“The whole idea of the program is to introduce these ideas to you folks, and then you talk about them and decide what you want to do,” said Burkitt. “It depends on what parents and constituents want,” stated Ron Burkitt.
