Nicole Raz
WMAL
WASHINGTON (WMAL) — School starts in just a few weeks and parents in a small Leesburg community are fighting with Loudoun County Schools about how kids will get there.
The school board has expanded walk zones in some areas in a bid to save money, and the Red Cedar neighborhood is one of those that is now set to have students walking instead of riding a bus. The cost of driving children to school averages 757 dollars a year per student.
“It’s not like the School Board came out and said, ‘Let’s make this a walk zone,’” School Board Member Bill Fox says the area of Red Cedar falls into an existing school board policy about when walk zones should be created.
But parents like Donna Meek argue that taking away bus service is dangerous for students.
“The streets are very narrow and we don’t have sidewalks in portions of the neighborhood,” Meek told WMAL.
The school board has offered sidewalks and and crosswalks to make the walk safer but the Homeowners Association doesn’t want them.
“If the county wanted to put it in, then they would have to maintain it,” Meek said.
Fox told WMAL that the HOA is being “negligent” by not allowing sidewalks to be built, and in doing so they’re putting the Board of Education in a “difficult” position.
“We want student safety to be paramount,” Fox said. “But setting the precedent that an HOA or a subdivision where the roads are sort of privately owned and maintained that they can simply hold up the creation of walk zones by being obstructionist, that’s a really, really bad precedent to set.”
Fox said the Board will receive the results of additional safety and distance studies within a week and will then continue the conversation whether or not to go forward with the expanded walk zones.
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