Florida Child Injury Law Blog

Archive for October, 2011

At the law office of Clearwater Child Injury Attorney James W. Dodson, we all too often encounter cases where children have been injured traveling to and from school.  We envision a world in which all children are free from harm, and child safety is the rule. Florida is part of the nationwide Safe Routes to School initiative.

What Safe Routes to School Hopes to Achieve

Among the goals of the program are to increase bicycle, pedestrian, and traffic safety, and decrease traffic congestion, to have more children walking and bicycling to schools. Other benefits will be improved community safety, accessibility and increased community interest in bicycle and pedestrian accommodations. 

How to Achieve Safe Routes to School

These goals can be accomplished by encouraging community involvement and improving partnerships among parents, schools, municipalities, and community organizations, and by improving the physical environment to increase the ability to walk and bicycle to school.

What are the 5 E’s of Safe Routes to School Recommended by the Federal Highway Administration?

• Engineering to create infrastructure surrounding schools to reduce speeds and conflicts with motor vehicles and safer crossings, walkways, trails, and bikeways
• Education to teach bicycling and walking safety skills and driver safety around schools
• Encouragement through activities to promote walking and bicycling 
• Enforcement by police of speed limits, yielding to pedestrians in crosswalks, and proper walking and bicycling behaviors; community enforcement, e.g. crossing guard programs
• Evaluation by monitoring and documenting outcomes

Clearwater Child injury attorney Jim Dodson endorses this program and encourages readers to support its goals to make his vision of child safety a reality.

One of the most difficult things to report on is the preventable death of a young child. But if our reporting these tragic accidents can alert families, relatives, and caregivers to the dangers and increase everyone’s vigilance when children are present, we will have performed a useful service.

A release from Associated Press reports that a toddler, 2-year-old Mark Andrew Van Cott, drowned Thursday evening in a lake bordering the backyard of his grandparents’ home in a St. Petersburg’s Brighton Bay area.

The toddler was playing inside the house while his grandparents were preparing dinner. They suddenly noticed he was no longer around and began searching the house for him.

The child’s grandfather then went to search the back yard and saw him lying face down in the lake near the shore. He pulled the little boy from the water and began CPR, which was continued until paramedics arrived.

The young child had apparently gotten out of the house through an open sliding glass door leading to a screened in back porch, and then got out through a screen door that was not secured. The lake is about 60 feet from the house.

The family said that he was not out of sight for more the five minutes before being found in the lake.

Drowning is the number one cause of death in children under 5 in Florida. These tragic child deaths can be prevented by making certain that all doors that could give a child access to water are properly secured, and ensuring that an adult is assigned to keep a watchful eye on a child who is playing anywhere in the vicinity of water.

This week across Florida and the nation it is National School Bus Safety Week, October 17-21. Florida’s departments of Education, Transportation, and Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles have teamed up to develop a safety campaign entitled Stop on Red, Kids Ahead to impress Florida’s drivers with the importance of stopping from both directions for a school bus that is loading or unloading children with lights flashing and signs extended. The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles reports that Florida drivers illegally pass school buses nearly two million times every year!

Clearwater child injury accident attorney Jim Dodson successfully represented a local thirteen-year-old child recently, who suffered broken bones to a leg and foot when  hit by a car while getting off  the school bus at a regular stop. The driver who struck the child was attempting to pass the stopped school bus. These accidents are becoming all too common. In Central Florida, nearly a dozen students have been injured in school bus accidents since the beginning of the school year.

We encourage drivers in Florida and around the nation to be mindful of the law and of the safety and well-being of our children during National School Bus Safety Week and throughout the year.

Kissimmee parents have expressed serious concerns for their children’s safety after a 13-year-old Neptune Middle School student was hit by a car while walking to get on her school bus on Tuesday. Florida law requires that traffic stop in both directions when a school bus is stopped with signs extended. The girl is expected to be okay, but parents complain that cars passing stopped school buses is a common occurrence. We have reported before on the number of children seriously injured or killed in school bus stop accidents because  drivers show such blatant disrespect for the law and the safety of children.

This accident happened at the intersection of Wellington Woods Circle and Hoagland Boulevard, an area that does not appear on Kissimmee’s list of areas where cars passing stopped school buses has been a problem. The road is patrolled, however, and police have been monitoring the area since the start of the school year. The Kissimmee Traffic Enforcement Unit has issued 98 citations to drivers for passing stopped school buses, but the problem persists.

Kissimmee and Orlando have been designated the nation’s most dangerous region for pedestrians by advocacy group Transportation for America’s Dangerous by Design study. Children should not have to be fearful when they walk to their school buses.

Jim Dodson Law recently obtained a settlement for a Pinellas County student who was seriously injured under almost identical circumstances to the Kissimmee school bus accident. While crossing the road in front of her stopped school bus, the child was hit by a car that was passing the bus from behind. The driver of the car was simply too impatient to wait. Irresponsible drivers who injure children must be held accountable!

 Joining students around the world, Pinellas County school children are participating in the 13^th Annual International Walk to School Day Wednesday, October 6. The entire month of October is International Walk to School Month, during which events will be held in many parts of the world to encourage children to walk or ride bikes to school.

 In Pinellas County, the event is sponsored by the Suncoast SAFE KIDS Coalition and All Children’s Hospital. Its focus is to promote pedestrian safety, fitness, and community involvement, according to Cecilia Barreda with the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department. Crossing guards, community police officers, firefighters, parents, and teachers accompany students walking and biking to school, helping them learn safe habits.

  The goal of the international event is to make the world more pedestrian friendly and to

• Encourage physical activity by teaching children the skills to walk safely, how to identify safe routes to school, and the benefits of walking 
• Raise awareness of how walkable a community is and where improvements can be made
• Reduce traffic congestion, pollution, and speed near schools

 Organizers of the event hope to raise awareness of the many benefits of walking and to make the world a safer place in which to do it.

  The National Center for Safe Routes to School of the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center maintains a website with information about International Walk to School Day and International Walk to School Month at http://www.walktoschool.org.

 Florida has the worst record in the nation when it comes to pedestrian safety, according to the oft-quoted Transportation for America Dangerous by Design study. Jim Dodson Law is deeply committed to pedestrian, bicyclist, and child safety.  We encourage family members to get out and participate in this event during the month of October and beyond!