The Legislature has voted to do away with daylight saving time. If Congress approves, and four other Western states follow suit, it will become official. Everyone keeps asking: What about schoolchildren and those dark winter mornings?
The answer, of course, is Safe Routes to School. Every year local children are injured by drivers on their way to school. Preventing these kinds of collisions requires more cohesive coordination between schools and municipalities. Having served on a school community council, which is tasked with safe routes, there are two top issues:
First, district involvement for safe routes plans often consists of last-minute reminders to turn in annual requests for crosswalks. This gives insufficient time to identify plans for improvement. It also suggests that only engineering matters for safe routes; there are actually six E’s for success: Education, Encouragement, Engineering, Enforcement, Evaluation and Equity. See Safe Routes National Partnership for more.
Second, school community councils experience high turnover and little training for safe routes. The result? Duplicate and/or nonexistent efforts with no forward traction year after year.
HB236 offers the support that school community councils desperately need to better protect our children. Let’s make Safe Routes to School a priority.
Mary Wade
Provo