Safe School Zones

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School zones are meant to be safe areas around schools that provide student pedestrians with clear sidewalks and a buffer from speeding drivers and road hazards. While there are several positive measures being taken to ensure the safety of students in Brooklyn Center, dangers still exist for children who walk from the south side of the school and have to cross 59th Avenue N. in front of Earle Brown Elementary. The lack of sidewalk and viable crossing points puts children at risk every day and must be changed.
While typically a quiet street, 59th comes alive on school days as parents and buses dropping their students off flood the street with a high level of traffic. There is an existing sidewalk on the school side of the street, but the …show more content…

If additional crossing patrols were added, additional staff would be pulled away from other responsibilities to monitor the patrols. This would increase workloads for staff at the school and cloud create the dangerous potential for crossing guards to simply not be monitored due to lack of staff.
The best possible solution for increasing safety for student pedestrians is improving the infrastructure in the school zone on 59th. By adding a sidewalk to the residential side of 59th, students leaving the neighborhoods south of the school would be allowed a safe walking path, off the street. Students would have a more direct path to the school sanctioned crossing locations. An additional crosswalk and caution signs located along this stretch of the road would give students a clearly marked safe zone to cross the busy street in. Motorists would have a more defined area to watch for pedestrians as …show more content…

However the National Center for Safe Routes to School (NCSRS) provides federal grants to school districts to improve the existing infrastructure around schools in order to make them safer for student pedestrians and bikers. In an article published in the National Civic Review (2014), NCSRS founder and staffer Hubsmith and Mennesson state that funding for bussing is being cut in many districts. They go on to explain how this provides an excellent opportunity to encourage students to walk and bike to school. They cite a case study where a school district was given a grant to improve infrastructure around the school and eliminate one full bus route. This will save the district almost $50,000 a year (p. 41). Federal funding and district savings greatly increase the viability of this

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