PORT ORANGE, Fla. – Port Orange city leaders are working this summer to create new, high-visibility safety features around all of the schools in the city.
It comes after a nine-year-old girl, ShaoLan Kamaly, was killed in May when she was hit by a car while riding her bike in a crosswalk outside of Sugar Mill Elementary. Investigators said the driver was speeding through the school exit and did not fully stop at a stop sign.
The city and Volusia School District have already added new speed bumps in the school’s driveway to keep drivers more alert.
Now, the city is adding more safety features around Sugar Mill and its nine other schools. What each school gets depends on the location and needs of the school.
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“What we’ve got is the location of the schools and enrollment, we can see the neighborhood dynamic. You can see the breakdown of the number of crossing areas that are potential hazards,” explained Mayor Don Burnette.
Burnette said they developed data to decide what each school needs.
“To not learn and make it better for everybody else based on what happened there, that would just make a tragedy even worse,” he said.
Burnette said they are adding new, brighter crosswalk signs around all schools.
The Port Orange Police Department is recruiting two more Community Service Officers to control car traffic, so now six schools in the city will have them. Those officers will work with the crossing guards who handle the pedestrians.
The city is also extending and fixing some sidewalks near schools and clearing brush.
“These efforts have to be combined with the awareness of the drivers in the zones. They can’t be on their phones or they’re rushing. Leave five minutes earlier. Change your habits,” said Burnette.
The mayor said they’ll be adding even more on top of this list this summer for all schools in the city.
There are also longer-term projects in the works such as pedestrian safety studies and back at Sugar Mill where the accident happened, the city is working to add a new right turn lane into the school to control traffic even more.
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