Highland leaders hope citizen survey leads to improved safety for students

Highland leaders are asking residents to fill out a survey about student safety and walking to school in the hopes of getting some help with future infrastructure.

Highland city leaders are pursuing a Safe Routes to School grant, which would fund a study to evaluate the existing routes to and from each school within the city of Highland and determine any barriers that prevent students from walking and biking to school.

The plan will then prioritize those barriers and create a plan for future development, according to the Highland District 5 website.

City Manager Chris Conrad said the main focus will be the new primary school under construction on Poplar Street. “It’s a rock and chip street, so eventually we want to go through and rebuild it,” he said.

The new street would be concrete with gutters, built to an urban standard with a shared-use path so that the campus could be walkable. At the moment, the sidewalk ends at VFW Road, which is about two blocks away from the school.

That is not a cheap project — possibly $2 million — and so the city hopes to get some grant assistance for the survey and possibly future assistance for the construction itself.

In order to do this, the city and schools need parents to share information about their children’s transportation. Set up online, the survey asks questions about how far the family lives from school, how they get to and from school and how long it takes, the parent’s comfort level with allowing a child to walk or bike to school, and what other factors exist.

Some of those factors might be family issues such as convenience and timing, before- and after-school activities, child care requirements, and more. But other factors might be the amount and speed of traffic along the route, the presence or absence of sidewalks and other infrastructure to protect children, the presence or absence of crossing guards, concerns about crime, and more.

It also asks whether the schools encourage or discourage walking and biking to school, and how fun and/or healthy parents consider it to be, with space for parents to give their own comments and suggestions.

Also among the projects under discussion might be biking and walking paths along Illinois 160 to connect the neighborhoods north of Highland Middle School, from Troxler Avenue north to Daiber Road. Highland Middle is the only other school that doesn’t have sidewalks or a shared-use walking path, Conrad said.

At some point Highland will be working with Madison County Transit, as there is an ongoing project to connect Highland to the greater Madison County trails and connect from Troy along Highway 40, Conrad said.

“Our study will be part of that overall plan that MCT has as well,” Conrad said. “We want everyone’s opinion. These are everybody’s tax dollars … and the more people walking or riding bikes to schools means less cars on the road.”

In the meantime, residents are asked to take the survey, which has been posted on the Highland District 5 website and will be announced at next week’s city council meeting and on the Highland Happenings app. Time is short, as the survey results need to be communicated to the Illinois Department of Transportation by Oct. 1.

“It’s kind of exciting,” Conrad said. “This is a new part of town that’s going to get some activity and development. There are a lot of homes on the south end of town, it’s an attractive area for young families to live.”