City wins Safe Routes to School grant

The City of Sisters will soon have $290,000 to spend on improving pedestrian and bicyclist safety enroute to Sisters schools, thanks to a grant from the Oregon Department of Transportation.

The funds are part of the Safe Routes to School grant program. The money will be used to build a number of infrastructure improvements, including sidewalks and paths, school crossings, and bike racks at Sisters Elementary School and Sisters Middle School.

These improvements will encourage students and parents to walk or bike to school, and improve safety.

The Safe Routes to School program requires that all grant applications be collaborative between a school or school district and a local city or county. The City of Sisters partnered with the Sisters School District in June, 2009, to apply for the grant funding.

As part of this collaboration, the City of Sisters and the Sisters School District assembled a Safe Routes to School advisory committee in 2009 to help identify the high-priority infrastructure projects that would provide the most benefit to pedestrian and bicycle safety for elementary and middle school students in Sisters.

The committee included staff, parents, advocates and others: Leland Bliss (Sisters School District), Don Pray (Deschutes County Sheriff), Brad Grimm (City of Sisters), Paul Bertagna (City of Sisters), Laura Lehman (City of Sisters), Chuck Humphreys (parent), Michele Sims (parent), May Fan (parent), Jana Novotny (parent), Jessica Kelly (Deschutes County Health Services) and Kim Curley (Commute Options).

The Safe Routes to School program promotes walking and bicycling to school using the five Es: Education, Encouragement, Enforcement, Engineering, and Evaluation. To this end, the program provides funding for two types of projects, non-infrastructure and infrastructure. Non-infrastructure projects can consist of classroom activities, walking, school buses, traffic enforcement, and other activities. Infrastructure projects can include bicycle parking, development of sidewalks, development or striping of bike lanes, and other physical improvements.

The City of Sisters and Sisters School District also applied for a non-infrastructure grant, which was awarded to Sisters School District in September, 2009, and is currently funding education and encouragement programs at the elementary and middle schools.

Maps showing the proposed improvements identified by the advisory committee are available to view at Sisters City Hall.