Bethel district officials walk to school with students over road safety concerns

SPANAWAY, Wash. — Some students in the Bethel School District were joined by school board members on their walk to school Wednesday morning. The walk-along was planned to highlight what district leaders say are unsafe conditions as more students are walking instead of taking the bus.

District officials say students face daily hardships due to the lack of proper infrastructure and they wanted to understand what students have to go through every day to get to and from school.

About 30 district officials and school board members joined students on their walk to Spanaway Middle School using a route many kids use every day.

District leaders say many of the roads in the area aren’t safe for walking. They say only 9% of the roads in the Bethel School District have sidewalks and most of them don’t have streetlights, and it’s dark when students are walking to school.

Spanaway Middle School Principal Shannon Leatherwood came up with the idea for the walk.

We spoke with Leatherwood, who detailed a scary experience a mother had with her two children while walking to their school.

“On the day that we organized this, I called the superintendent that day and said we had an incident where a mother and her two children were walking to our school. They were followed by a couple of men down B Street. And she did not have a phone or any way to get help until she got to our school. She was pretty distraught,” said Leatherwood.

This isn’t the only issue the district is dealing with. There’s also an ongoing school bus driver shortage, which is affecting other students.

The district says it has lost 60 drivers in the past two years, and last month when 40 drivers called out sick, the problem was front and center.

Last month, we talked with several parents who say things are so bad that students are late to class and they worry that the situation is hurting their education.

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