Traffic problems plague local elementary school

View larger image Laura Cuver, a first grade teacher at Leslie Fox Keyser Elementary School, helps Faith Athey, 6, into her father’s truck outside the school on a recent afternoon. The Warren County School Board is beginning to address longstanding traffic and parking issues at the school. Rich Cooley/Daily View larger image Kevin Glascock, a parent volunteer at Leslie Fox Keyser Elementary School, directs pick-up and drop-off traffic outside the school recently. Rich Cooley/Daily

Parent volunteers, staff now get children to buses, parents' vehicles safely

By Joe Beck -- jbeck@nvdaily.com

FRONT ROYAL -- Kevin Glascock stood in the middle of Stonewall Drive at Leslie Fox Keyser Elementary School Monday with a two-way radio directing cars backed partway down Stonewall Drive toward Easterly Street.

Glascock is the father of two children at Leslie Fox Keyser and, like many other parents neighbors and educators, he is worried about traffic flow in and around the school.

The Warren County School Board is taking the first steps toward trying to solve longstanding parking and traffic problems at the school. In the meantime, Glascock has been doing his part by volunteering to help the school staff get pupils loaded safely into buses and their parents' cars at the end of the day.

He performs his duties on Monday, Thursday and Friday when he has some time off from his job as an accountant in McLean. Traffic Monday was manageable, but there are days when it's far worse.

"We have had it where the cars have backed all the way to Easterly," Glascock said.

Help may be on the way, but no one is sure exactly when it will arrive. A proposal by an engineering firm that would convert part of a grassy area behind the school into additional parking and a driveway pickup ran into objections from some parents, who wanted more say in the project.

The board responded by informally deciding at a work session last week to organize a committee of school staff, central office officials, two school board members, parents and the division's maintenance and transportation director to study the issue further.

"It's been one of those things that's been discussed for a number of years, and we really need to try to do something," said Superintendent Pamela McInnis.

Principal Brenda Ring summarized the risks and hardships the current parking and road configuration poses around the school in a memo to the board last week.

"Stonewall Drive is a dead end street and when the traffic is backed up at the beginning and end of the day, emergency vehicles do not have quick access to the school or the houses across from the school," Ring wrote.

She added: "Traffic flow at this time is a safety concern. There are [more than 580] students trying to get to school at the same time with cars and buses all the time in front of the school."

Assistant principal Jerry Rosperich said a couple of fender-benders, one in each of the school's two parking lots, led the school to institute the current "kiss and ride" system. Under "kiss and ride," parents enter one of two driveways open to them on Stonewall and drive to one of several designated curbside spaces to drop off or pick up their children.

Members of the school safety patrol and school staff escort the children from a waiting area inside the school as their parents arrive.

Glascock said he and other parents also want to see traffic congestion relieved around the site. But they want to find an answer that doesn't involve paving over the green space that children use during recess and physical education classes.

Rosperich said most of the outdoor activities children enjoy in the grassy area could be moved to an open space in front of the school, although he concedes the alternative space is moderately sloped, and the current area used by pupils is flat.

The grassy area makes a good site for additional parking because its flat surface and absence of vegetation reduces the costs of site preparation, Rosperich said.
Trying to find a site that will ease the traffic and parking problems at a reasonable cost won't be easy, he said.
"I don't think we're going to keep everybody happy on this," he said. "We want it to be safe. We want do something about traffic in front of school."