MAKING SURE YOUR CHILD IS SAFE  BY MARY MCGARR:

 

MAKING SURE YOUR CHILD IS SAFE

SEPTEMBER 13, 2005

Updated April 10, 2014

By Mary McGarr

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. One thing you should know, of course, is that while school buses have things that look like cameras, not all of them ARE!  It's cheaper that way.

Many people apparently still don't know that a running school bus, stopped to pick up or let off students, may not be passed in either direction until it closes it's doors and starts to move again. My point here is that you need to assure yourself that the situation on your child’s bus is as safe as it can be.  Don’t just assume that it is.

(Recently we learned that a law was passed saying that all Texas school busses had to have seat belts three years ago.  But our school district, unlike many others in Texas, cared so much about your children that they decided to wait until they were forced to implement the law before doing do.  It wasn't like they didn't have the money, as they seemed to have plenty when Superintendent Frailey, decided on a whim to put Astroturf on all the high school practice fields for 5 or 6 million dollars.  Choices.  It all boils down to choices. Preferring Astroturf that no one needed to making sure that little kids are safe says a lot about the person(s) who made that decision!)

Chances are, even if you tried to get on the bus to see for yourself what your child's bus is like, the driver would not let you.  I know.  I tried that one time. (My son had been accused of poking a hole in the seat.  I didn't believe them, and I wanted to see for myself.)

 Of course one time when a neighbor's dog got on a school bus and wouldn't get off, the driver allowed me to get on it and coax it off.  I assured her I could since I'd taken that dog back to his yard many times just to get him off the street.  And I was successful, but it took that episode about 45 minutes to play out, and in the mean time I'm guessing there were plenty of parents wondering where their kids were!

Later as a board member I realized the necessity of the practice of keeping parents off the bus.  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, how fast they go, 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.  [And remember I wrote this in 2005, and yes I know most elementary school students now HAVE to walk!] 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. Since the Superintendent, Alton Frailey,  removed bus service for the youngest children in the District in 2012, my words here are especially important.  Parents need to just sit on the superintendent and the Board until they bring the buses back.  You as a parent can accomplish the return of these buses if you will just be persistent and not let them make promises that they surely will not keep, or otherwise compromise you with favors to get you to back off.  Keep the goal in mind.  There is no reason why KISD had to take away these buses.  If they don't have enough drivers, then let the Superintendent drive a bus.  Let the coaches drive a bus.  In the past, coaches have driven KISD buses.  They are not too good to do that in an emergency.  I have suggested elsewhere on this web site that recruiting stay-at-home mothers by offering to train them in exchange for a guarantee of three years service, might not be a bad idea.  It would also help if they paid them more for their work! Your child's life may depend on what you do about this matter!

Probably the least safe means of getting to school is riding a bike.  Elementary students, no matter how agile and able, do not ride bikes safely.  I always look at a young kid on a bike 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 front curb, you can’t do much more to help him between your car and the front door!

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.  Go watch from across the street sometime if you do not believe me.

No one in that parking lot 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 twenty-five or so years we’ve had them, I have never known that to happen except once, and that was for a senior student who was going one mile over the limit!  How many moms and dads and truckdrivers have YOU seen speeding through school zones and/or passing others in that zone!

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 their schools, please look at the KISD crime files elsewhere under this topic.

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. And now we have expensive tracking software and hardware in place that takes your driver's license number and does who knows what with it, all in the name of keeping children safe.  None of us complain because the safety of the students is paramount.

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 Texas Open Records Act. Not one newspaper ever has. There used to be an even more detailed description of the crimes given to board members, but that was not given to the public. I also found that sometimes school board members were not told of some crimes. After looking at the reports for the last twenty-three years, I can tell you that the District reported way more information in the past than they do now.  Only reason for cutting back, in my opinion, is that they are trying to hide the crime from parents.  Wouldn't look good for the greatest school district in the world to have a lot of crime going on!

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.

There is no way to stop criminal activity in our public schools. It helps to have the halls monitored.  Ironically, when some of my friends and I tried to initiate such an effort in the early 1990's, Superintendent Hayes pitched a fit and wouldn't even talk about allowing parents to be a part of the effort to perform that duty!  We've come a long way since then.

In the Bond Election in 2006, Superintendent Merrell used keeping our schools safe by installing the access monitoring system as a hook to get people to vote yes on the bond.  What people didn't know was that a parent had already offered to purchase that system and give it to the District!  And if the system were so important, as we all know, the District had plenty of money left over with which they could have purchased this system themselves and almost a year before it was actually installed after the bond election! 

Are our schools safe?  Well, no, they're not.  During the last bond initiative, the KIDS PAC (the pro bond PAC) was allowed to have meetings on school campuses to push the bond.  They would have, sometimes, two meetings at a time.  The Katy Watchdogs would go to some of the meetings just to see what they were saying. (Usually we were about the only ones there.)  A friend and I had met to go to one being held at West Memorial Junior High.  We walked into the school at about 6:45 PM, looking for the meeting.  It was nowhere to be found, and we discovered later that it had been canceled. As my friend and I walked the building, we saw cleaning people, a coach sitting in the hall grading papers, and a meeting going on in the library.  But no one was monitoring the halls or access to the building.  ANYONE could have gone into that school, done whatever they wanted, and walked out undetected.

I'm guessing that's still the situation after school hours.  Someone please tell me that it's not!

Schools need to have controlled access no matter what time of day it is, for obvious reasons.

There's still that lingering question, though, and that is "Are your children safe at school?" 

As more people ask for the information, the school district has become less inclined to be as transparent as they might be. (But they cannot seem to figure out why we keep telling them that COMMUNICATION is a problem for this school district!!!) You can decide for yourself why that is. For example, in prior years the Watchdogs pointed out that there were an inordinate number of "sexual assaults" transpiring.  Now they don't tell you what kind of an "assault" has occurred, so you just get to use your imagination. I might point out that by law, the school district is supposed to tell you the good AND the bad that happens.