This week is National Road Safety Week. This is a week of events to end devastating road casualties by making communities safer. The week is also run by Brake, the road safety charity of Aotearoa New Zealand to help raise awareness of the terrible carnage on NZ roads. 

As lead teacher of Newmarket School’s Travelwise team, I oversee the weeks activities.

Road Safety event student leader coordinator is Stella and with her were 4x other student leaders who offered to plan for and implement one of daily school wide activities.

Over the past fortnight the team met to discuss and finalise details for their activity. Part of this preparation included creating a slide to back map ideas, scheduling and meeting the principal for event approval, broadcasting the week before at our school assembly, and approaching peers and extra adults for support in running activities. 

You can see that there are a lot of events happening to highlight this very important week on our Travelwise calendar.

Here are some of our statistics for the week.

• We raised $168.00 for Bright day and had David Seymour our local minister of parliament join us.
• We had 86 children take part in the Milo mornings as encouragement to walk or scooter to school. We guestimated 60 students to take part from our previous surveys and activities.
• We counted 46 scooters on our scooter rack, an increase from 9.
• We had heaps of posters for the Step up for Road Safety Competition because we are keen to win a Big Foot Adventure for our school.
• We had 21 3D scooters handed in and they were fabulous.

On Friday we have our final activity which is walk or scooter to school and get another free Milo.Over the week lots of fabulous highlights surfaced and I commend the way the student leaders dedicated and carried out their part to ensure the smooth running for the week.

Overall, I believe the Road Safety Events held at Newmarket School raised awareness about being safe on our roads. Even more important was standing back and observing our student leaders plan, work together and create activities that involved the whole school.

Already I have had other students approach to be part of the Travelwise team and the student leaders have asked what the next event is. Tomorrow at our weekly meeting we will evaluate the week and identify areas for improvement as we will definitely run it again next year.

Update

On Friday we gave out 114 Milo. We had 36 scooters lined up on the rack with 18 helmets.

Giving out stickers we noticed the amount of children not wearing a helmet and the number of secondary students jay walking. At our next Travelwise student meeting results will be discussed and evaluated and our next steps identified.