Fertile Minds of Middle Schoolers Sprout Traffic Safety Ideas

If you want some fresh ideas on how to reduce traffic dangers when kids are pouring into our out of school through the heavy traffic of drop-off and pick-up, ask a school full of middle schoolers.

That was the approach taken by Prospect Sierra Middle School, a private school for 5th-8th graders in El Cerrito. The school held a contest and offered prizes for the winners.

So anticipation ran high at the school assembly Wednesday where the winners were to be announced.

There was no shortage of entries.

"About half the school participated in this," said parent Andrea Saveri, who co-organized the contest with Kathryn Lee, the school's Director of Innovation, Partnerships, and Service. 

Twenty-eight ideas poured in initially, and eventually 18 teams of students presented their proposals and received scores. And what did the school's panel of judges choose?

Eight were selected as winners, with the top four receiving special honors. The school said it will refine the eight ideas and try them out when classes resume in the fall.

First to be named among the top four was the three-student team "K.S.T.," which proposed rewards for arriving 10 minutes early and thus reducing the 8:15 a.m. crush of cars just as school begins. Their "early bird stamp card" would collect stamps that could be used to redeem items at the student store.

Also in the top four was one student's idea to have three or four people outside wearing reflective sandwich boards carrying messages such as "Use the crosswalk" and "Slow down" during drop-off and pick-up.

The two-student team named "Awesome People" made the top four with a digital comic strip that can be distributed to parents, kids and others in the community that promotes traffic safety in a playful and constructive way.

Rounding out the first four was the three-member team "Swoosh," whose idea was to mark a crosswalk in some way, such as a with a reflective device, that would make it stand out more.

The other four teams and their ideas were

• "Mission Awesomeness": stencil the streets or sidewalks with chalk art messasges promoting traffic safety
• "Safety Police": reflective flags with safety messages that would be placed in containers on both sides of the crosswalk for students to carry across
• "Plutonium Destruction": a student safety council and safety team to be out on the street monitoring traffic safety
• "Purple Awesome Person": students trained as safety coaches

The school asked that students' names not be published.

"This is a great example of what kids can do," Saveri said during the assembly.

"This is a very, very impressive group of young people," El Cerrito traffic patrol Officer Chris Purdy told the assembly. "All the ideas I've seen are very well thought out, and you guys really deserve a lot of credit for what you've done."

Among the proposals that Purdy liked was the early bird stamp card, he said, adding that it represents "a plus instead of a minus."

"Everybody knows what the police do," he said. "We don't pull people over and give them a thumbs up. So it's nice to see ideas with the ... incentive being you're doing something good."

The prizes given to the winners included iPod Shuffles, Amazon gift cards and movie passes to the Cerrito Theater.

Lee singled out the theater for special thanks, saying, "They donated all of these tickets because they were so inspired that students, right up the hill from where they are, are working on real-world issues right here in our community." The school purchased the iPod Shuffles and Amazon gift cards.

Saveri said the school is looking forward to developing the ideas further and applying them.

"We've got eight great ideas now, solutions, that ... we're going to pilot and work on in the fall," she said. "... We're going to see what works, how they need to be improved, and we're going to put them into action."

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