We are the year 7 school council from Greenfield School in Newton Aycliffe. Welcome to our Living Streets Campaign-in-a-Box blog. 

We have been looking at the streets around our school to decide how we can make our walk to school safer and nicer and therefore encourage more people to walk to school. When we thought about our walk to school and marked things on the map.

 There were lots of things which we could have focused our campaign on. We went out and took photos of some of these things.

There are a lot of subways around our school as it is on a busy road. These are not pleasant at all to walk through and we don’t feel very safe in these. People smoke in them and set fires, there is a lot of graffiti some of which says things which are not very nice and they often smell of urine. Also sometimes older people block your way and don’t let you past or push you.

 

A police officer has been coming to the subway nearest our school at the end of the school day and this is a really good thing but he can’t see everything that is going on at once. There is also CCTV cameras near this subway but they don’t point into it and we don’t know who owns them or if they work.

 

The road outside our school is 40 mph and sometimes people speed on this road. People have tried very hard to get this speed limit changed but have been told that the speed limit can’t be changed and that traffic calming methods can’t be put in place as it is only two times a day that the traffic needs to be calmed.

 

There are also traffic islands outside our school. A teacher stands outside school to make sure people cross using these and if they don’t they get told off but still sometimes people run across the road. People also run across other roads near our school which are 40mph instead of using subways.This is where people run across the road.

 

We have decided to focus our campaign on the subways. We are going to do two things. We will invite the police officer who comes to our school to talk with us about the subways. We will tell him that it is really good that he is coming down to the subway after school but we would like someone there before school too. We will also ask him about the CCTV.

We are also going to fundraise to do a graffiti/street art project in the subway outside our school. This will mean that people will not be able to graffiti over the top of it. We will use the graffiti to get messages across like healthy lifestyles and respecting rights. To decide what designs to use we will have a competition where anyone in the school can submit designs around the themes of healthy living and respecting rights. We will have a vote to decide on which designs to use. Before we start this project we need to raise money so we are going to do a presentation for our school governors to let them know what we want to do and why. We will also talk to our head teacher about what we could do in school to raise money. 

We are all looking forward to doing this in September.