Kingsley grant proposal looking for safety improvements for Children Walking to School.

Mr. Tom Lambert and Ms. Allegra Johnson of the Kingsley Parents Council, together with the Principal of Kingsley Charter Elementary School, Ms. Karen Graham have put together a very strong grant application to improve the safety of Kingsley's various routes to schools in order to encourage more children to walk. The Safe Routes to Schools grant application will be submitted to the DeKalb County School System Superintendent, Dr. Crawford Lewis and the Dunwoody City Manager, Mr. Warren Hutmacher for their signatures early next week and then submitted to the Georgia Department of Transportation for their final consideration.

A special thank you goes out to Mr. Lawrence K. Kaiser,P.E., Partner/Owner of Collaborative Infrastructure Services, Inc. for donating his engineering expertise towards this project.

Though the Kingsley application was chosen for the final grant submission it should be recognized that the Principals and PTA's of Chesnut, Peachtree, Vanderlyn and Austin, in cooperation with the DCPC, have all been meeting to assess what can be done to improve each school's route to school in order to make it safer for children to walk.

Making Dunwoody a safe community in which to walk & bike is a very large, long term goal of mine while I serve on the Dunwoody City Council and I will continue to look for innovative funding streams for these types of projects.

Here is another possible grant opportunity from the RWJ Foundation which is also in line with what we are doing with the Safe Routes to Schools program.

http://www.rwjf.org/files/applications/cfp/cfp_HKHC2008.pdf

But the big catch is “All grantees must secure a cash and/or in-kind match equal to at least 50 percent of the RWJF award over the entire grant period.” However, any proposed spending for sidewalks and bike lanes may be able to count as the matching 50%. There is a possibility that the City of Dunwoody could apply for this grant in conjunction to improvements needed on Womack near the new school or possibly the PCID could make use of it for the benefit of all concerned.