The Junior Road Safety Officers work hard to promote Health Well Being in the school and community with a variety of schemes to tackle road and traffic safety issues.
Our Junior Road Safety Officers continued on with their duties to improve school safety and travel. They also updated their display wall and submitted it into a competition being run by Travel and Roads safety Management. The updated wall encourages alternative travel methods to school and we hope to develop the next level of skills training in the Nursery with Scooter Skills. This wall earned them a runners up prize across East Ayrshire.
Sustran – Scotland’s Big Newsletter Story Competition
The J.R.S.O.s visited one of our Nursery feeder schools along with ‘Kirky’ our transition monkey to find out from the pupils of Riccarton if scooter to school would be of any interest to them. They surveyed 27 pupils and 19 scootered to nursery and would scooter to school, if allowed. However worryingly – more than half of them thought that pedestrians should move out the way to allow them to scoot on the pavements. I think the J.R.S.O.s have their work cut out for them.
Kilmarnock Academy pupils helped design and make a scooter rack which will be located beside the bike shed to allow storage and also we hope to encourage this as a playtime activity.
One of East Ayrshire’s Road Safety Team entered Kirkstyle into a competition to promote an ‘Active School Travel’ story for a Newsletter competition. The reason from submitting the article was because the school had an ongoing parking congestion and wished to promote sustainable active travel to try and offer alternative ways to get to school. The school developed a scooter skills programme using the expertise and skills of the J.R.S.O.s and used scooters purchased from Parent Council fundraising. The officers delivered the programme using Sustran’s scooter skills lessons; the pre training before cycling proficencey and also one part of the Ready, Steady Bike initiatives.
SCOOTER SKILLS WORKSHOPS
Kirkstyle Primary School in Kilmarnock organised and delivered basic scooter skills activity workshops at Primary 1 /Nursery induction days in June. The Parent Council raised funds to purchase scooters to promote scooting to school as one solution to help reduce the ongoing parking congestion at the school.
A member of staff and the two J.R.S.O.s in the school led the workshops. Small groups of nursery children, some of whom had never been on a scooter before, eagerly took on the challenge. None of the 25 children refused to take part and all the children received a certificate.
The workshops consisted of short discussions and hands on activities so that the children developed an understanding of the need to ride safely and not cause a nuisance to others while scooting. We hope it might be a winner and get some goodies as prizes range from puncture repair kits and Frisbees to bike lights and slap bands.
The Big Pedal – March 2012
The pupils have registered for the BIG PEDAL from the 5th – 23rd March 2012 the school will participate in this event. In March 2011, over 800 schools helped to pedal 600, 00 school journeys by bike in just 15 days. In 2012 we want Kirkstyle to be one of those schools. But will you be one of the riders? Can you help us top one million bike trips? Once again, every trip to school by bike will count towards a “virtual “stage race round the U.K. We’ll keep you posted on how you can take part nearer the time.
