Growth Pushes Youngsters Into Harm’s Way : Students Forced to Duck In and Out of Whizzing Traffic

Once the Del Dios schoolhouse stood alone in quiet fields of wildflowers at the side of a narrow black-topped street and was served by Escondido school buses. Now it is between two busy highways--Interstate 15 and Valley Parkway--and within the neon glare of a new shopping center.

The school has not moved, but Escondido has grown out to surround it, turning the quiet byways into congested arterials. The familiar yellow buses that formerly shuttled students between home and classroom are only a memory, a victim of Proposition 13’s limit on property taxes. Now, parents or car pools must drop off and pick up the youngsters who live beyond walking or bicycling distance of the school.

The 1,141 students who attend Del Dios Middle School on West 9th Avenue now must dodge rumbling trucks and speeding automobiles to make their way to school and home each day. Parents who shuttle their youngsters from distant points must buck the same through traffic to deliver and retrieve them.

So far this year, the toll is one child dead, killed when he lost control of his bike and collided with a truck on Sept. 17, and several minor injuries to students trying to share the crowded streets with the heavier, faster vehicles.

“There was another one this morning,” Del Dios Principal Royce Moore said Friday.

A student bicycling down 9th to school was brushed and dumped by a driver turning onto an Interstate 15 on-ramp. The hit-and-run driver then sped up and left the youngster bruised and crying on the sidewalk. Another motorist who witnessed the accident took the injured youth to school.

Moore took the youngster home after he had been given first aid but could give the child’s mother little assurance that her son would be safe even after new traffic measures are installed.

“The only sure way to prevent traffic accidents would be to devise a vacuum tube that would suck the students across the street, whoosh,” without encountering traffic, Moore said, only half-jokingly.

The death of 12-year-old Juan Aguirre mobilized parents at the Del Dios Middle School to action. They confronted the Escondido City Council this week, 150 strong, and demanded an end to the uncontrolled traffic flow along 9th. The council, bowing to the emotional issue, responded with approval of a dozen safety measures, including adult crossing guards and a ban on truck traffic past the school grounds.

None of the new measures, which have yet to be put into effect, would have prevented the death of Aguirre last month.

A parent, waiting to pick up several youngsters after school Friday, said he had witnessed another near-fatality the same week that the youngster died. A pickup truck struck a young girl who was crossing the street near the school “and she was almost carried under the truck and crushed.” The car-pooling parent explained that he had had some near-misses with school youngsters near the school.

“They think that they are immortal, that nothing can hurt them,” he said. “Even when you are on the lookout for them, they come dashing out unexpectedly from the most unexpected places.” He refused to give his name.

Escondido police say that the Del Dios school safety record has been no better or worse than some other schools located on busy Escondido thoroughfares. Police Chief Vincent Jimno and City Manager Vern Hazen agreed with parents that some improvements, including additional well-marked bike lanes and additional sidewalks near the Ninth Avenue school, would lessen the danger, but they balked at parents’ requests that a 15-m.p.h. speed limit be imposed past the school and that four-way stop signs be installed at the nearby intersection of 9th and Del Dios Road. Both men said that such stringent measures would probably be ignored by some drivers, increasing the safety hazards.

Moore said that some of the traffic congestion is caused by parents dropping off students. Although the school has off-street parking areas where the parents can deposit their charges, many drivers find it too time-consuming to use them and drop youngsters off on both sides of 9th, he said.

“You know what happens then. The kids take the most direct course, mid-block, to cross to the school,” he said. The four-way stop signs would have alleviated some of the problem by giving drivers using the off-street parking an easier chance to turn back into busy 9th.

Truck traffic from quarries and a county trash dump to the west will be detoured off 9th when signs go up later this month, but traffic from a new shopping center adjacent to the school grounds may replace the trucks when the first stores open this weekend, Moore said.

“I see the changes coming as providing the students a greater opportunity for safely traversing their routes to school,” he said, but he added: “It isn’t a foolproof system.”