Guest Viewpoint: Florida Hazardous Walking Conditions Law Inadequate To Protect Our Students

October 2, 2019

Wednesday wass “National Walk to School Day”. But children in Florida are often at risk when walking to school, according to Rob Doss, a retired Marine and educator, and the retired director of transportation for the Escambia County School District.

He believes the Florida’s Hazardous Walking Conditions” law is inadequate. Doss explains why, in his own words:

If I handed you a Florida statute entitled “Hazardous Walking Conditions” and told you that it describes the conditions under which a public school student’s walking conditions would be judged “hazardous,” what would you expect to find as you read it? Think of your elementary school child or grandchild for a moment. What criteria would you expect the Florida legislature to have in place that would adequately protect children as they’re making their way to and from school during the busiest traffic times of the day?

Think of an intersection that has stop lights like the one at Mobile Highway and Michigan Avenue or Barrancas Avenue and Navy Boulevard. Those are complex intersections with right turn on red authorized, left turn arrows, and free-flow right turn lanes…traffic moving in all directions. Let’s say that the intersection has a traffic volume of 3,600 vehicles passing through it every hour. That’s 1 vehicle passing through the intersection every second. Would you expect that intersection to be considered hazardous for a student to cross on their way to school?

Now, think about Kingsfield Elementary and Ransom Middle School students crossing at the intersection of Kingsfield Road and Highway 97, Tate High School students crossing Highway 29 at Kingsfield Road, Jim Allen Elementary School students crossing the intersection of Highway 29 and Muscogee Road, or Beulah Middle School students crossing 9 Mile Road at Rebel Road. Would you expect either of those intersections to be hazardous for your child or grandchild to cross on their way to school?

Finally, let’s think of a road that has a posted speed limit of 35 mph but has very little room for a person to walk on the side of the road. The road has a traffic volume of 150 vehicles passing by in each direction. That’s a total of 1 vehicle driving by every 12 seconds. Do you think the law would consider that roadway to be hazardous for a student – or any person for that matter – to walk along so closely or to walk on the roadway itself?

You would probably be surprised to learn that none of those scenarios are considered hazardous for public school students of any age under the law.

It’s obvious that section 1006.23 of the Florida Statutes, the law that defines hazardous walking conditions for public school students, is a woefully inadequate criteria for determining whether a walking route to and from school is hazardous for public school students. It neither safeguards public school students who reside within a reasonable walking distance of school nor encourages infrastructure development and improvement that would make walking to and from school safe for students. It’s particularly unfortunate that this statute is in the Education Code, a place where one would expect to find guidance that reflects a thorough understanding of the cognitive ability of children and the need to provide them safe access to quality education.

However, in probably every school district in Florida, including in Escambia, school districts transport those students around conditions that the state doesn’t consider hazardous. The state classifies those students as “ineligible” transported students and provides school districts no funding support to transport them safely like it does other students. But that transportation service is costly to school districts and when they find themselves in a crunch to fund classroom initiatives, they often look for resources elsewhere such as unfunded student transportation service.

In fact, ineligible ridership has become such an issue in Florida that for the 2017-18 school year, Florida school districts reported that they transported more than 90,000 students who were ineligible for a state funding contribution at a cost to local school districts of more than $92 million statewide. Escambia County reported transporting 3,506 ineligible students during the 2017-18 school year at a cost to the school district of nearly $3.5 million. Of course, not all of those students were transported because of hazardous walking conditions, but many were. The fact is, however, that the decisions that school districts have made to transport those students even without a state funding contribution has kept kids alive. What other choice have they had? The question is why, in spite of the existence of a statute in the Education Code that deals specifically with hazardous walking conditions for students, are Florida school districts left in that position?

The fact that the National Complete Streets Coalition has placed Florida at the top of the list as the nation’s most dangerous state for pedestrians and the fact that the nation’s 6 most dangerous metropolitan areas for pedestrians – and 8 of the top 10 – are in Florida lends additional credence to the concern about the inadequacy of the hazardous walking conditions statute.

It’s well past time for the Florida legislature to adopt a reasonable, responsible, and cost-conscious improvement to the hazardous walking conditions statute like the one that I have proposed in order to protect children who encounter hazardous walking conditions between home and school.

Comments

3 Responses to “Guest Viewpoint: Florida Hazardous Walking Conditions Law Inadequate To Protect Our Students”

  1. A mom on October 4th, 2019 2:33 pm

    We need more sidewalks up in the north end of the county & more families might get out more. Some of the kids that do have to walk in the grass on side of the rd to get to their bus stop are needing sidewalks.

  2. Margielu1982 on October 3rd, 2019 7:04 am

    These hazardous conditions (particularly the one mentioned by the author) also contribute to vehicle accidents as more and more parents make the wise choice to drive their children to school. Unfortunately, more drop-offs clog the turn pockets, overflow into regular lanes (because parents have nowhere safe to queue up out of active traffic lanes or on soft shoulders) and this further blocks school buses and commuters as elk s emergency vehicles. No where is this more evident than at Escambia County schools.

    We have developers that refuse to make safe sidewalks a priority, drivers who disobey safe vehicle operation basics (especially self restraint) and drive on the shoulder where our school aged children walk to school.

    This madness of inadequate safe walking (and bicycle riding) lanes/walkways needs immediate attention. We have resource officers on every campus; why not also LEOs surveillance every school zone and neighborhood where these extremely unsafe co dictions exist?

  3. Oversight on October 2nd, 2019 7:45 pm

    More likely cheaper to pay transportation for those students in the walking zone @ $92 million/year than to make billions of dollar infrastructure improvements. Just saying. By the way, where are our BOCC and state legislative delegation? They should be weighing in on this topic, like yesterday. So press them to answer these concerns soonest.

Written by William Reynolds · Filed Under News