Newton County School District trustees are weighing their options after Mississippi Department of Education demanded parents stop parking along Highway 15 during student pickup at Newton County Elementary School.
Superintendent J.O. Amis said MDOT is concerned about the possible safety hazard created by cars parking alongside the highway during the afternoon. MDOT suggested rerouting the student pickup line through the cemetery next to the school, but after speaking with Decatur Mayor David Marshall, Amis said that wasn’t going to work.
In a Newton County Board of Supervisors meeting Oct.1, Amis and Marshall spoke to supervisors about the situation.
“They’ve been wanting to reroute the parked cars through the cemetery,” Marshall said. “That’s a hard no for the city.”
Marshall said he was in contact with representatives from MDOT to try to figure out a different plan that would meet everyone’s needs. He said it may be possible to widen or change the entrance to the elementary school to accommodate more cars.
Supervisor Joe Alexander said his suggestion would be to build a secondary entrance to the school north of the Career and Technical Center, which would create a big loop around the elementary school for parents to park along.
Amis said he’d like to have an MDOT traffic engineer study the flow of traffic at the school to help come up with ideas.
“I think they will help us do more studies on the flow of traffic,” he said. “But I think the main option is going to be what Joe just said.”
In a Newton County School Board meeting Monday, Amis advised trustees of the situation to see if they had any ideas.
“I did tell them at the Board of Supervisors, if I need to send something home…that’s what I’ll do,” he said.
Newton County Elementary School Principal Jason Roberson said one issue is parents arriving hours in advance of students being let out. Although student pick-up begins at 3 p.m., he said parents begin arriving around 1 p.m. Traffic, he said, doesn’t spill onto the highway until later in the afternoon, about 2:30 p.m. A safe option for parents would be to arrive shortly after student pick-up begins at 3 p.m.
However, Roberson said, it doesn’t make sense of the school district to spend tens of thousands of dollars building a staging area for cars near the Career and Technical Building, when the issue of cars on Highway 15 isn’t the district’s problem.
“Why would we do that,” he asked. “We tell them, ‘I’m sorry. The state says you can’t park here,’ and we let them figure it out.
The Board of Supervisors, Town of Decatur and school board have all pledged their support for the project. However, without further input from MDOT on how to proceed, neither the school district, city or county has the authority to proceed. Highway 15 is a state highway, which means MDOT and Mississippi Highway Patrol have jurisdiction.
Amis said MDOT has yet to announce whether they’ll start ticketing parents parked along Highway 15 in the afternoons. However, he said, parents should remember they can always have their children take the bus home.
“We run 32 routes,” he said.
Although neither the school, city or county can make or enforce rules concerning Highway 15, all three municipal bodies said they will do what they can to make sure after school pick-up is safe for both parents and students.
“The bottom line is we just want everyone to be safe,” Amis said.
