City is Awarded Grant for Second Straight Year.

The City of Santa Clarita was recently awarded a $435,000 grant from the State of California’s “State Safe Routes to School Grant.” The grant money is allocated to the City’s ongoing campaign to create a safer environment surrounding schools for children as well as to encourage them to walk and bike to school, which should help to decrease traffic. This is the second year that the City has received this grant.

The money awarded this year will go towards installing improvements in the areas surrounding Canyon Springs, Meadows and Emblem elementary schools. These improvements are scheduled to be installed in the Summer of 2009. The three schools chosen for last year’s grant, Santa Clarita, Newhall and Cedar Creek elementary, will have their improvements installed in the Summer of 2008.

“As a result of the City applying for and receiving this grant, the areas surrounding the elementary schools in Santa Clarita will be made safer so that children can walk and bike to school without incident,” said Mayor Pro-Tem Frank Ferry.

Originally the City visited all of the 26 local elementary schools and did an assessment, ranking them on a level of safety and the grant money that is received goes toward upgrading the areas surrounding them according to the need.

The “Safe Routes to School Grant” will be used to do numerous upgrades including redoing all cross-walks so they are more visible, updating all signs to the required neon yellow, installing countdown pedestrian displays for the street crossing signals, installing driver feedback signs that monitor and relay the speed of those driving by and extending out the sidewalks at key intersections  to make the distance of crossing the street shorter and pedestrians that are standing on the sidewalks more visible.

For more information about the upgrades that will be used to increase safety for the City elementary schools, or more information about the “State Safe Routes to School Grant,” please contact Ian Pari, City Senior Traffic Engineer at (661) 284-1402.