Winterville rolled out its new Safe Roads to School program this week with “Walk and Roll to School Day” at W.H. Robinson Elementary and A.G. Cox Middle schools.
Wednesday’s event drew dozens of students who arrived at school via “walking school buses” or “biking trains” chaperoned by parents. Winterville Safe Routes to School Coordinator Katherine Dale told the Pitt County Board of Education on Monday that the town received a $200,000 grant designed to promote healthy habits by giving local elementary and middle school students a chance to safely walk or bike to school.
“This is part of the district wellness policy,” she said. “We’re thinking about getting kids out of cars and getting to school by walking, biking, rolling.”
Dale, a marine ecologist and postdoctoral researcher at East Carolina University, told the board that having kids walk or bike to school results in transportation cost savings and has been shown to result in better academic focus. But she said student safety is a primary concern.
“Unfortunately I wish this wasn’t the case but the leading cause of death for children under 12 in North Carolina is motor vehicles,” she said. “Every day we get behind the wheel and we wield a weapon. It’s cars and it’s guns. I don’t want that to be the case; I want us all to be safer and that includes educating all of us, adults that are around our schools and driving.”
Dale said part of the focus of Safe Roads to School will be to to educate drivers through signage and other reminders alerting them to watch for students and to avoid using their cell phones while driving in school zones. As the program expands, she said one idea is to create a “bike library” that would allow students to rent bikes to ride to school for a semester or a year.
“The grant is a non-infrastructure program,” she said, “so we’re not installing crosswalks or even bike racks as part of this grant.”
Still, motorists and pedestrians passing through Winterville this month may have noticed curb extensions and high-visibility crosswalks that have been added near A.G. Cox. The additions, a collaboration between the town and North Carolina Department of Transportation, were part of mini-grant awards from the National Center for Safe Routes to School, funded by General Motors.
Winterville is one of three towns announced last month to receive GM grants of up to $10,000 to provide low-cost, quick build infrastructure improvements to provide safety benefits in underserved areas where children and teens walk and bike. The town is using the funding to install curb extensions at three separate intersections.
“This funding is a great opportunity to bring enhancements to our community that would have not been possible otherwise,” Assistant Town Manager Anthony Bowers said in a statement. “The collaboration from these entities is going to enable us to establish much safer routes for the children in our growing, walkable community.”
In conjunction with North Carolina Active Routes to School, Safe Kids Pitt County, and the Eastern Carolina Injury Prevention Program at ECU Health Medical Center Walk and Bike to School also aims to raise the number of kids wearing helmets by educating them early on the importance of wearing a helmet and practicing safe pedestrian and biking practices.
According to Safe Kids, properly-fitted helmets can reduce the risk of head injuries by at least 45% — yet less than half of children 14 and under usually wear a bike helmet.
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