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Katy Citizen Watchdog$ |
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We’re Taxpayers. It’s Our Money. |
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Keeping Your Child Safe |
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Every morning your child routinely takes off for school.
Modes of transportation vary, but each can create some concerns for you as a parent.
Riding the bus is the transportation of choice for most elementary and middle school students. Katy ISD busses are ordinarily kept clean, serviced regularly, and the drivers are licensed and trained to drive them. The District puts red stop signs that come out when the bus stops to keep drivers from recklessly passing when the bus is loading or unloading, and hopefully those mechanical devices help the situation.
No need to worry too much about that part of it. But you should concern yourself with some other things. Over the years issues such as older children picking on younger ones, too many children seated in one seat, the lack of seat belts, and the use of cameras to record student behavior have all been discussed by your School Board. Whatever the latest fad is, you can be assured it’s being tried on your child’s bus in Katy ISD.
My point here is that you need to assure yourself that the situation on your child’s bus is a safe as it can be. Don’t just assume that it is.
Chances are, even if you tried to get on the bus to see for yourself, the driver would not let you. I know. I tried that one time. Later as a board member I realized the necessity of that practice. But you can observe from without by waiting with or for your child as he departs or arrives, and such attention is recommended.
Sometime you should follow the bus just to see how the driver drives, the route taken, and the number of children who finally wind up on the bus before it gets to school.
Unless your neighborhood has sidewalks, I would not let a child walk to school. Walking in the street is just not safe. If your child has to walk a long way, I would also take advantage of the bus. There are too many dangers lurking along the way. Children become easily distracted and are not always careful crossing streets.
Probably the least safe is riding a bike. Elementary students, no matter how agile and able, do not ride bikes safely. I always look at young kids on bikes out in the street and think to myself, “His mother must not like him much.”
If you drive your child to school, you are helping to create hazards for the other children who walk, ride bikes or take the bus, because you add to the traffic congestion. Probably one of my all time pet peeves is to watch the mother in the car in front who, while you wait patiently, watches her child walk up to the front door of the building and walk inside before she will move out of PARK and get herself out of the way. Trust me. If you’ve brought your child to the door, you can’t do much more to help him once he gets out of the car!
If you have a child in high school, you should say prayers for him every night, especially if he is driving his own car to school. Your child is never in more danger than he is arriving or leaving the parking lot at his school.
No one there seems to want to interfere with careless driving practices and outright violations of the law. Nary an assistant principal is ever seen watching over the bedlam.
How easy it would be for those in control to amble out most afternoons to take charge. Such is not the case.
There is a Katy ISD police force, and we would all appreciate if they wrote tickets for those who pass us in school zones. In the fifteen or so years we’ve had them, I have never seen that happen. There is no better use of their time.
Once your child is inside the building, someone else is in charge of his safety. If you want to see how safe students have been in the first six months of this year, please look under the “Useful Information” section on this web site and then click on “Katy Schools Crime Statistics.”
The endless list of physical assaults, sexual assaults, suspicious persons, weapons possession, thefts, burglaries and so on will surprise you.
These events aren’t happening in just a few schools. I think you’ll find just about every school listed has had a crime or two.
And don’t forget, these are just REPORTED crimes and then crimes that are reported to the Katy ISD police.
I once told a young looking school board candidate that she could walk in one door of Mayde Creek High School and out the other end and no one would stop her or ask her what she was doing there. She did just that, and as predicted, no one asked her what she was doing in the school. I was trying to make a point about school safety, not violate that safety. Too often, only when someone is a board candidate who raises issues does anything get changed or fixed! Eventually, after much arguing, monitors were placed in our schools to stop the intruders of all varieties from going wherever they chose within a school building.
For years I have suggested to the local papers that they should obtain a listing of the crimes in local schools as I received that report weekly as a school board member and found it very alarming. Such information is subject to the Open Records Law. Not one of them ever has. There used to be an even more detailed description of the crimes given to board members. I also found that sometimes school board members were not told of some crimes.
One school board member cannot change what is happening, but a lot of angry and concerned parents might.
Most crimes I can think of, except murder, have occurred within our Katy schools. That’s not a very pleasant thought, but I put it out there, so that you as parents can be more watchful and so you can caution your children to stay where they belong, make sure they are with others at all times, and to always follow the school’s rules which are designed to keep them safe. |
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Mary McGarr, Katy Citizen Watchdog$ |
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Date: 09/13/2005 |
