Who is teaching our children about road safety?
Or put another way, is anyone teaching our children about road safety?
We ask this because we are still upset – as are others – by the accident on the Moravian Highway in Nisky the other day that left two children, a brother and sister, seriously injured.
We do not know all of the specifics of what happened, but it appears that the children were not as careful as they could and should have been. We say that based on a report Thursday in the Independent that the police will not press charges against the driver because the children were crossing the street in front of a stopped vehicle, not at a crosswalk.
We don’t know if the driver was quite as careful as he might have been. But we do know that the incident triggered grave concerns for us that we either are not teaching our children what they need to know about road safety or we are teaching them the wrong lessons.
Case in point: a crossing guard near the Jarvis School annex in Pollyberg. This woman consistently stops cars that have a green light and encourages the children in her charge to cross on the red light.
What lesson does this teach the children?
It teaches them that it’s fine to break laws and rules. It teaches them that they don’t have to be careful when crossing a street – a lesson that many of them clearly have absorbed, as anyone can attest who has watched them afterward, darting out into traffic and walking in the streets alongside moving vehicles.
In an earlier era teachers underscored road-safety lessons regularly: look both ways before crossing the street, only cross on a green light, cross at the corner and not in the middle of a block.
Are today’s teachers imparting those life-and-death lessons? If not, they should be.
As for some of our school crossing guards, they clearly are not teaching those lessons. That needs to change immediately – and the people in charge of the crossing guards need to make sure it happens.
Please, let us not wait until we have a real tragedy before we realize what a disservice we may be doing to our children by not teaching them what they need to know to ensure their safety.