At our school mobility has been one of the main issues from the beginning. A group of students were very worried about the lack of safety awareness and by brainstorming have brought together different ideas to generate a change at our school.
The ideas
Many accidents can occur during a bus route. In regards to the issue of safe travel, we must generate awareness in students and all the community of Aspaen Gimnasio La Fragua that road safety along the school bus route is very important. Since our school is located not too far from the city, we find that more than 80 % of the school community uses the school bus service. For that reason, we embarked on a journey for safe travel.
First, through observation, we identified the population in the school which takes a school bus. Then we collected data from the school bus service's coordinator which was really helpful and gave us the proper tools to work with.
While we were observing the students heading to the school buses, we noticed certain repetitive actions committed by students such as: standing up while the bus was moving, students eating and drinking inside the bus, students sometimes being impolite with the school bus driver, etcetera.
Due to these actions, we ‒ a small group of students from 8th grade ‒ could not bear to see this any longer and we decided to take action by showing the school community the rules we have to keep in mind when taking the school bus. We wanted to become agents of change and contribute to a safe road and generate awareness of school bus rules.
The initiatives
As leaders of the project, we thought about the most common problems concerning students’ behavior along the school bus routes; after identifying the problems we decided to spread the school bus service rules through the School Bus Service Coordinator.
In addition, we made a set of presentations explaining safe behavior on the school bus through PowerPoint presentations, forums, informative brochures, videos, posters and drawings. Our team worked with primary and secondary students on these activities and it was a big challenge since it inspired many students to become involved in this difficult issue.
Most of the students from every grade actively participated in the project. Finally, we summarized the rules, giving them to each school bus monitor in order to remind students while travelling. All this had a strong impact on our school community.
This awareness campaign on road safety has widened our knowledge about the responsibility each one of us has to apply safety measures, and the rules we have to follow during the school bus route.
The images displayed are samples of the PowerPoint presentation and the construction of the project that we worked on.
Finally, the video we prepared shows the result of the work that was done on heading to the school buses. Some children from first grade appear in the video because this age is the starting point in which we can create awareness and educate students to safer behavior. We also did this with students of other grades.
To sum up, the most important fact of this project was the results, which showed us that our students have the right attitude to do things in the best way. Everyone participated actively.
