The Village recently won a substantial federal Safe Routes to School grant to fund upgrading sidewalks so that local children can more safely walk or bike to school.
Village wins grant to enhance safety for kids
- Published: July 12, 2012
Last month the Village was notified that it had been awarded a substantial federal grant funded under Safe Routes to Schools, a program aimed at making it easier for children to walk or bike to school. The program originated from concern on the federal level over childhood obesity.
The Village received $308,000 for infrastructure repairs and $15,000 for educational efforts, according to Village Assistant Planner Ed Amrhein at a recent Village Council meeting. Amrhein said the bulk of the money will go toward installing new sidewalks and repairing current ones.
The successful grant effort was a two-year collaboration between Amrhein at the Village and the SRTS team, a group of parents and community members. The group met monthly for two years to create a School Travel Plan to submit to the state to identify the need to improve local travel routes to school. The SRTS team included in their effort a substantial amount of public input, gathered from several parent surveys, interviews with stakeholders and a public forum, according to SRTS team member Dan Carrigan. Other SRTS team members were Deanna Newsom, Sylvia Ellison, Kate Anderson, Tim Tobey, Rachel Meyer and Mark Hunter of Eggeman Engineering.
The SRTS team sees the upcoming upgrades to local sidewalks as benefitting not only children but all community members.
“I’m interested in this because it’s good for the whole village,” Carrigan said.
Work funded by the SRTS grant will probably begin in the spring of 2013, according to Village Manager Laura Curliss this week.
For a more detailed article, see the July 12 issue of the Yellow Springs News.
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Washington wants you to have this because a bankrupt nation won’t have obese children to worry about for very long.