Safe Streets for Students

• Look at crash history to determine which schools have the highest safety concerns.
• Create action plans for high priority schools.
• Create transportation safety toolkits for all schools in the Boulder Valley and Saint Vrain Valley School Districts (BVSD and SVVSD).
• Make it safer for students to walk, bike, or roll to school.

• Fewer students are walking and biking to school than ever before. Walking and biking to school is beneficial for students’ health and fitness, academic performance, and independence! Improved safety and transportation infrastructure can encourage more students to walk and bike to school.
• Schools do not control all of the transportation infrastructure around them, so collaboration between jurisdictions and schools is important to create a safe and connected transportation network.
• Both BVSD and SVVSD have open enrollment (also called school choice), which means that some students are traveling from farther away to attend school. This creates unique transportation challenges and requires solutions that allow students to be both active and safe on the way to school.
• Yellow school bus service is limited in BVSD and SVVSD because of local school zoning and open enrollment, so additional transportation options for students are even more important.
• Your input can help us identify places where it might feel uncomfortable for students to walk, bike, or roll, even if there is no crash history there. Your input will also inform and guide what solutions are best suited for different school communities.

Sign up for email updates to stay informed about all the engagement activities, starting in Fall 2026. The opportunities for participation will include:

• An online survey
• A virtual public meeting
• In-person pop-up events

• Priority schools will be determined based on several factors including crash history, demographic information, existing infrastructure, and community input.
• All schools in BVSD and SVVSD will get a transportation safety toolkit that will provide recommendations based on the type of school. The toolkit will give staff the resources they need to create a Safe Streets for Students Action Plan for your school.

The improvements will be safety infrastructure, programs, and policy recommendations to address the specific safety challenges that schools face.

Examples include:

• Safety infrastructure
  • Protected left turns
  • Enhanced pedestrian crossings
  • Improved sight distance
  • Bicycle lanes
• Programs
  • New or improved crossing guard programs
  • New education and encouragement programs
  • Walking school bus
  • Bike trains
• Policies
  • Policy guidance for selecting school bus stop locations
  • Policy for using temporary materials like traffic cones or crossing guards to manage pick-up and drop-off traffic

• All public K-12 schools in BVSD and SVVSD

Community partners who will be participating in this planning process include, but are not limited to:

• All cities and towns in Boulder County
• Weld County and City & County of Broomfield
• North Front Range Metropolitan Planning Organization (NFRMPO)
• Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG)
• Denver Regional Mobility and Access Council
• Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT)
• Boulder Valley School District (BVSD)
• Saint Vrain Valley School District (SVVSD)
• Boulder County Public Works Department
• Boulder County Sheriff’s Office
• Boulder County Public Health Department
• Boulder County Mobility for All Program
• Boulder County Vision Zero Program
• Denver Regional Mobility and Access Council (DRMAC)

• Safe Streets for Students has safety benefits for everyone, not just people traveling to and from school.
• It will help parents who have to go straight from school to work consider alternative transportation options to get to work. When students are dropped off at school by car, parents often need to drive to work as a result. When students feel safe walking or biking to school, parents have the option to take alternative transportation to work too!
• Reducing congestion and pollution around our schools helps everybody!

The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) provided funding for the project, with a local match from Boulder County, City and County of Broomfield, Weld County, the Town of Erie, the City of Boulder, the City of Longmont, and the City of Louisville.