Parents of children who attend Tripp Elementary School will have to adjust to a new morning drop-off and afternoon pick-up routine, beginning in the middle of the fall semester, according to officials.
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Starting Sept. 21, the buses will line up on Fabish Drive, clearing room for parents to circulate through the bus loop on Highland Grove Drive, said superintendent Theresa Dunkin. The teachers’ parking lot, where parents have gotten used to dropping their children off in recent years, will close to public traffic.
The Aptakisic-Tripp Elementary District 102 School Board approved the new arrangement during their Tuesday meeting, after a presentation about current and possible traffic configurations from Dunkin and Stacey Bachar, assistant superintendent for business services.
When describing the present situation for her board, Dunkin said it was “hundreds and hundreds of people in a tight spot” creating a very frustrating situation.
The problem, they told the board, centered at the staff parking lot, which is directly across Highland Grove from the mouth of Newtown Drive. At present, parents turn in and out of the staff lot’s single entrance point, while kids walking from the east use a crosswalk at that point, Dunkin said.
The intersection is a four-way stop, but on Friday, Bachar said they wanted to disperse that combination of car, bus and foot traffic before something bad happened.
“That’s the whole point: We don’t want to wait until it does,” Bachar said.
So, beginning Monday, Sept. 21, parents will have separate entrance and exit points, in the loop on the school’s east side, Bachar said. She added that the exit to the parents’ new drop-off-pick-up lane will be right-hand-turn only, which should prevent a driver determined to turn left from clogging the process up while waiting for a gap to appear on Highland Grove
Tripp welcomes nearly 600 students per day, and Bachar said a Buffalo Grove Police Department traffic study counted 105 to 115 parents’ cars rolling through the parking lot in a 10-minute period. Bachar said she and Dunkin started looking for a better traffic layout for Tripp years ago.
After settling on the general idea of moving the buses out to the streets and the parents into the bus circle, they started going through the details, she said.
“We’ve been poking holes in it for two months,” Bachar said.
Of course, no system that involves children as pedestrians, school buses and drivers is going to be perfect, they said.
Bachar and Dunkin noted one of the major problems of the new layout: Once the buses park along Fabish, they will be in “pick-up” mode, with their stops signs out, meaning cars will not be able to legally move past them for anywhere from seven to 12 minutes.
“We have logistics left to do,” Dunkin said.
Bachar noted, though, that Fabish is not a thoroughfare that carries much traffic, and that the parents who pick their students up tend to arrive well before the buses, in hopes of getting good position in the line.
“I don’t see a mad rush at 3:20,” Bachar said. “They’re all situated.”
In the new system, all buses will use the small sidewalks that connect the Fabish sidewalk to the curb just north of the building. There are presently five of those “pads,” as Dunkin called them, one for each of the five buses that stage on the street instead of going through the bus loop.
Bachar said the district will build four more, between the existing pads and Highland Grove, then add a new sidewalk leading to a school exit.
A few parents might still try to go into the teacher’s lot, Dunkin noted, but she said they would have staff ready to turn them away.
“We would tell them ‘No,'” Dunkin said. “That’s pretty easy for us to manage. It’s all about training.”
Bachar noted that Tripp’s car traffic increases in the winter, when more parents drive their kids rather than have them traverse icy sidewalks. Dunkin requested — and unanimously received — a quick installation for the new program.
She told the board members that she wanted to get kids, parents, bus drivers and teacher acclimated to the changing layout before winter, snow and ice arrive.
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“It’s better if you let me do this when I’m comfortable with it,” she said.
Twitter: @RonnieAtPioneer