When six-year-old Thomas Wedman was struck and killed in a crosswalk near Ecole Marie Poburan in September 2013, it caused a wave of grief throughout the community.
When six-year-old Thomas Wedman was struck and killed in a crosswalk near Ecole Marie Poburan in September 2013, it caused a wave of grief throughout the community.
It also helped spur a serious look at the safety issues surrounding kids getting to and from school, culminating in St. Albert city council approving the 864-page Safe Journeys to School at its March 2 meeting.
School principal Marie Gamache-Hauptman said she was pleased to see the city take this incident so seriously that it produced such a lengthy document looking into the issue.
“I think that's a great model for our province for the city to have done something like that,” she said. “And the extensiveness of the report is real. The recommendations are real. They're doable and they're manageable.”
Among the recommendations are different steps to reduce the volume and speed of car traffic around schools by encouraging more walking, biking and busing.
Gamache-Hauptman said those recommendations get right to the heart of the problem, and address issues that have already been raised within the school.
“The volume of vehicles coming in our schoolyard and not just the school, but many schoolyards that are not designed for the kind of volume, is critical,” she said.
Following the accident, the school's parent council proactively put together a safety task force and made some changes, like reviewing and revising the map showing the drop-off and pickup zones at the school.
There have been a few traffic safety blitzes in the school's parking lot as well, with parent volunteers helping to make sure everyone driving through the area is following that map, and those have been very successful.
“I would say probably 98 per cent of our families have been very responsive to it,” Gamache-Hauptman said. “We still have parents who choose convenience over safety, but we continue to give the reminders. That's what those blitzes are about.”
For parent Leticia Rosillo, getting more kids walking and biking may not be the best solution, since a child walking to school and getting hit by a car was what spurred this report.
“I think more adults should be watching kids crossing the street,” she said. “Maybe two adults walking with them, instead of just telling them to walk to school.”
Todd Kalutich said he thinks the recommendations are positive. He picks up and drops off his son at the TreeHouse Playschool, in the same building, and sees first-hand how crowded it can get.
“It will help, but I don't think in the winter it will. Who's going to walk?” he said. “We should load them all up on a school bus. That's what we did when I was a kid.”
For Gamache-Hauptman, she said she hopes this report is the first step in a long-term far-reaching change of attitudes about how important this issue really is.
“It will absolutely need the work of all the communities involved: the school divisions, the schools, the city and I would think the province, to have a hand in this,” she said. “And I have great faith that they will. You don't write a 500-plus-page report and just stock it on the shelf.”
