Help Make School Routes Safer — Join Your Provo School’s Community Council
Why Join the Community Council?
Joining your School Community Council is an easy way to have an outsized voice in improving safe routes for walking, biking, and scooting to your neighborhood schools.
Every elementary, middle, and high school has a School Community Council made up of parents and faculty. These councils make key decisions for the school, including one particularly important task: submitting a Safe Routes to School Plan to the Provo City Engineer.
These plans include requests for the city to improve infrastructure – such as bike/scooter lanes, crosswalks, and school zones – to make routes to school safer for children and families.
This is an already-existing, formalized process for getting walking and biking infrastructure on the city’s radar. It also gives city engineers more leverage in budget debates to advocate for improvements. Yet many parents have never heard of it. We want to change that.
How to get involved
Within the first month of school, look out for an email calling for volunteers to join the Community Council.
If you don’t hear anything in the first few weeks, contact the school directly. In many cases, few people even know about the council, and all it takes is volunteering to get a seat.
If there are more volunteers than open seats, an election will be held. Don’t worry – it’s simple: you’ll write a brief paragraph about why you want to join, and parents will vote online.
Being able to name a few clear goals for Safe Routes to School can help your application stand out.
The Safe Routes Plan is due every fall, so it’s typically one of the first priorities for a newly formed council. For some councils, this is treated as a box-checking task – but it can be so much more.
Having even one person who cares about active transportation and student safety makes a difference. In my experience, suggestions like “What if we added a crosswalk here?” or “Why don’t we change this to make it safer?” were met with genuine interest – people just hadn’t thought of it yet.
What if you’re not elected?
That’s okay—all Community Council meetings are open to the public. You won’t have a vote, but in my experience, most council members are receptive to ideas from engaged parents.
Schools sometimes announce meeting dates, but not always. If you don’t see an announcement, just call the school office and ask when the next meeting will be, and when Safe Routes will be discussed. It might not be typical for non-council members to attend, but these meetings are legally required to be public.
The Bigger Picture
Imagine the good that could happen if a BikeWalk Provo advocate sat on every school community council. Just a few people could have a powerful influence on local infrastructure—and make our schools, streets, and neighborhoods safer for everyone.
