School Safety is Always in Season

by Richard H. Middleton, Jr. & Leah S. Guerry

Most of us, at one time or another, have heard the stories from our parents or grandparents that begin, "When I was your age, I used to walk five miles to school, even when it rained or snowed."

Life has grown increasingly complex. Students are walking to school often fighting much more than the weather. Some ride bikes. Others share sidewalk space with bikers. Some walk alongside streets with heavy traffic volume and intricate intersections. Others catch rides with parents or on school buses. Regardless of the way in which your child gets to school, it's clear - the streets of today are not your parents' or grandparents' streets.

According to the National SAFE KIDS Campaign based in Washington, D.C., great strides have been made in lowering the pedestrian injury death rate among children ages 14 and under. From 1987 to 1996, the pedestrian-motor vehicle death rate declined 41 percent, but pedestrian injury still remains the second leading cause of unintentional injury-related death among children ages 5 to 14. Of the nearly 900 children ages 14 and under who died from pedestrian injuries in 1996, 723 died in motor vehicle-related traffic crashes.

The SAFE KIDS Campaign literature on pedestrian injury notes that children tend to be more vulnerable to pedestrian death because the traffic situations they are exposed to "exceed their cognitive, developmental, behavioral, physical and sensory abilities." Children simply are not as experienced as adults when it comes to judging speed and distance. In addition, their auditory, depth perception and visual scanning abilities develop gradually.

To help your children travel to school safely on foot, the National SAFE KIDS Campaign recommends the following:

Never allow children under age 10 to cross streets alone.
Teach your children what the different traffic signals/markings mean.
Set a good example for your children — always use crosswalks and traffic signals, cross at corners.
Make eye contact with drivers before crossing in front of them.
Teach children to look left, right, and left again before crossing.
Walk facing traffic.
Prohibit play in streets, driveways, in adjacent unfenced yards, and parking lots.
Require children to wear reflective materials and carry flashlights to use at dawn and dusk.
Teach children to cross at least 10 feet in front of a school bus and to wait for adults on the bus loading/unloading side of the street.

Your child should cross the path of a stopped school bus with ample room because a blind spot extends for 10 feet around the bus. The driver will not see your child if he or she crosses within the blind spot. In 1996, 35 school-age children were killed, and about 5,000 were injured in school bus-related incidents. The majority of the children killed were pedestrians. You can help your child get off to a good start every morning by arriving at the bus stop at least five minutes before the scheduled bus arrival. Remind your children that the bus stop is not a play area.

It is also important to consider what your child is using to tote his or her books to school. A backpack, with its two shoulder straps, is one of the best ways to carry things — just make sure your child is wearing it properly.

The president of the American Physical Therapy Association in Alexandria, Va., says a properly carried backpack is supported by the strongest muscles in the body.

"Typically our proximal muscles, or muscles closer to the trunk of the body, are much stronger and have greater endurance than the distal muscles, those muscles farther away from the center of the body," says APTA president Jan K. Richardson, PT, PhD, OCS.

If your child is only slinging a backpack over one shoulder, he or she may be leaning more to one side, curving the spine. This curving, over time, could cause back, shoulder, and neck pain, not to mention something called "functional scoliosis," or curvature of the spine. Richardson recommends that students carry no more than 15 to 20 percent of their body weight.

To ensure that your children have a safe and healthy school year, encourage them to speak up if they have questions about the particular traffic situations they encounter as they travel to and from school, and to let you know if their school bags are causing them discomfort or pain.

Richard H. Middleton, Jr., president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, is a partner in the Savannah, GA, law firm of Middleton, Mathis, Adams & Tate, P.C.

Leah S. Guerry is the executive director of the Louisiana Trial Lawyers Association.

Reprinted with permission of Louisiana Trial Lawyers Association, P. O. Box 4289, Baton Rouge; (225) 383-5554 or (800) 354-6267.