Members of the Haines Borough’s Safe Routes to School task force will meet at noon Tuesday, June 29 to start mapping preferred approaches to Haines School. Volunteers will muster in the high school English room, just off the school foyer.
“We can have an official route that we encourage kids to take, especially the younger kids,” said Debra Schnabel, who serves as staff to the group.
Schnabel said she’s looking for a community consensus on routes so the task force can finalize an action plan and begin infrastructure or other improvements. The state program provides funding for upgrades that make it safer for students to walk or ride their bikes to school.
Changes that facilitate foot travel to the school aren’t necessarily physical improvements, Schnabel said. “We don’t want to build a sidewalk if it’s just going to be another snow storage area. The answer doesn’t have to be concrete. It can be operational, like plowing more snow.”
The group that meets Tuesday is charged with making “a dotted red line” laying out one or more approaches.
A key consideration will be a route along Old Haines Highway, where deep snows in winter force students onto the shoulder of the roadway. Options may include a raised sidewalk adjacent to the road, a trail located away from the road, or summer and winter routes.
“There’s no shoulder on the road. There’s no place to walk except right on the road,” said parent task force member Lenise Henderson, who called the stretch between the school and Second Avenue “treacherous.”
Teacher Matt Davis, who said he has walked to school nearly every day for nine years, often with his young children, identified the roadway adjacent to the school track as “sometimes very unsafe, where I thought my family and I were in danger of being inadvertently struck and killed by a vehicle.”
In winter, the stretch is dangerous during late afternoons when cars travel on both sides of the road, and in the morning before snowblowers or shovelers get out, Davis wrote.
Discussion at a meeting this week included considering short-cuts students are likely to make, addressing foot traffic from a new tribal subdivision opening this fall off East Fair Drive.
To receive Safe Routes to School funding, the local plan must incorporate enforcement, education and encouragement strategies. Enforcement may include establishing a crossing guard program for Old Haines Highway and resurrecting the annual “bicycle rodeo,” a bike-safety event.
Encouragement activities may range from a program to reward property owners for clearing sidewalks of snow to surveying students about the “walkability” and “bikeability” of their routes to school.
“Walkability” and “bikeability” checklist forms are available at the Rusty Compass coffee shop near Second Avenue and Main Street.
Borough leaders brought the Safe Routes program to Haines in 2008, after the rebuilt Haines School changed traffic patterns for students, staff and visitors. “Walking routes were neither established or evident,” according to the plan.
The task force has gathered statistics on how students arrive at school, from what streets and neighborhoods, and in what numbers.