Quincy walkers help identify safe routes to school
Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald Lauren Hyer, a student employee in the Quincy City Building Department, and building official Carl Worley inspect a sidewalk near the corner of Fourth and C streets Wednesday afternoon.
QUINCY — It was warm for a Wednesday afternoon in mid-March. But that just meant it was a good day for a group of Quincy residents to gather in the parking lot of the Quincy Community Center to take a walk.
Rob Henne, the transportation director for the Quincy School District, is busy handing out maps to each of the district’s current schools, and he’s asking walkers to look for things as they walk.
“Broken sidewalks, missing sidewalks, no crosswalks, crosswalks that need striping,” he said. “There are different things that we are looking for.”
The goal is to identify the safest routes to walk to school, Henne said, especially as the district reorganizes its boundaries beginning in 2019, when the new high school is completed, the current high school becomes the new junior high, and the current junior high becomes Ancient Lakes Elementary School.
“We need to identify some of the hazards. There are three different grants coming out which will help pay for sidewalks that need to be improved,” Henne said. “So that’s the reason we need to walk.”
Helping organize all of this is Amanda Rosales, a health educator with the Grant County Health District.
“Safe routes to school funding is available this year, so we are reaching out to communities that are interested,” Rosales said. “Quincy is very interested.”
Safe Routes to School is a state Department of Transportation program to identify problems and fund improvements to encourage more kids to walk and ride their bikes to school.
Rosales said the walkers will identify hazards on the maps they’ve been given, she will collect all the maps, crunch the data and send it to Olympia.
“And they will come up with some safe routes for kids,” she said.
Cory Medina and Francis Nielson, both teachers in the Quincy schools, are walking back from Mountain View Elementary, maps covered with marks.
“There weren’t a lot of sidewalks, not a lot of crosswalks, and lots of scary dogs,” said Medina, who teaches health and fitness at Mountain View.
“And not a lot of lights,” Nielson added.
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.