Dear Community Advocates,
Our SRTS Accomplishments of 2017:
2017 has been a hugely successful year for Cupertino’s Safe Routes 2 School (SR2S) program! This past year we have seen our program expand to all 14 schools located within city limits and have held some of our program’s biggest events yet.
With the expansion of our program and as a result of several community-wide parent events, all our schools now have supportive SR2S staff and parent champions working on projects related to walking, biking, or carpooling for their students. These projects range from the creation of a walking school bus at Lincoln Elementary, the Golden Sneaker award program at Stevens Creek Elementary, the first student-led bike stampedes at Homestead High School, and bicycle safety presentations led by police officers at all of our middle schools. On a City-wide scale, we held two of our largest community bike ride events, taking folks on three different routes around town and welcoming upwards of 75 riders per ride.
In addition to our events, this year saw the introduction of some new evaluation and engineering tools including our “Suggested Route to School” maps, which are maps that help identify the suggested routes for families to get to and from school by walking or biking. Furthermore, to improve student safety around schools we hired Alta Planning to conduct walk audit studies at all of our schools. These audits brought together City staff, school staff, and parent volunteers to create reports for recommended infrastructure and programmatic improvements that will help improve safety both on and around each school campus. These projects are starting to be implemented now. All of these new projects helped contribute to making this past year wildly successful for our program. Cupertino SR2S has seen extensive support for the program from all of our community partners and we are excited about what’s to come next year.
Goals for 2018/19
Moving forward, our schools will be focusing on their short and long term SR2S goals by making efforts to host more bike rodeos, organize walking school buses, and have more bicycle safety presentations as well as walk & bike events. On Monday September 18th, 2017, Cupertino parent champions and school officials met at City Hall to set goals for their respective school’s Safe Routes 2 School (SR2S) programs. These goals focused on improving each school’s program by utilizing four key SR2S elements; education, encouragement, equity, and engagement. For example, Regnart Elementary School identified short term goals of improving drop-off loop traffic and hosting a bike rodeo earlier in the school year. Cupertino High School developed a long term goal of conducting walk audit studies over the next three years so that they can better analyze and understand transportation trends from year to year. This diverse and productive group goal-setting session helped schools plan for the present and the future, ensuring that their site’s SR2S program will be as successful as possible. Cupertino staff plans to partner with school leaders and reference these goals to help direct program activities moving into 2018.
Thank you for your help and have a great holiday season!
Chelsea
Chelsea Biklen
Safe Routes to School Community Coordinator
LCI #5096
City of Cupertino | 10300 Torre Avenue |Cupertino, CA 95014
408-777-7609 |chelseab@cupertino.org | www.cupertino.org/saferoutes