Safety first for children and community members when it comes to crossing intersections

A lot of students that attend Congdon Elementary; walk from home to school daily. During the school year, there are different events apart of the Safe Routes to School events that help to make sure the intersections of E. Superior Street/Hawthorne Road and E. Superior Street/Congdon Park Drive are safe to walk across.

Those events are called Walk to School Day, Winter Walk to School, Bike to School Day, and Bike Rodeo.

Making sure that traffic in that area stays below the speed limit and that drivers continue to drive carefully. The safe routes to school committee is working on a grant to help increase awareness for their events next year.

“We want to have some funding for just more advertisements, the banners, the yard signs to promote this in the community promoted so that people know what we’re doing. And then, you know, again, using these events to try to get kids and families walking every day,” said Katie Benziger, parent to 2nd and 4th graders at Congdon.

There are two weeks left until the application is due. To learn more about the grant, send an email to Stevie Haaske at stefaniehaasken@gmail.com.

The committee has applied for this grant before; this time it is more centered on walking safely.

“I think this is the third time we’ve applied, and we’ve received different money for different initiatives. I am super excited that we’ve got the momentum going again; because, really and truly, for our families to safely walk to school, we do need to talk about signage and different things to do that. I think we’ve got a lot of good things going for us. We just need to keep the momentum going,” the principal of Congdon School Kathi Kusch Marshall mentioned.

“This is part of how we’re going to measure the success of the project. It is going to be based on our children’s attitudes, and parents’ attitudes about walking to school and biking to school behaviors. You know, they might feel one way, but how are the kids actually getting to school? And then also inclusivity. How are we able each year to keep capturing more and more kids,” shared Haasken.