School Board Keeps Kaneville Road on Traffic Hazard List

About 60 Geneva Middle School North and South students will get free bus service to and from school this year, even though School District 304 officials added a crossing guard on the route they would walk, the Board of Education decided Monday.

While students who live north of the middle school complex will be able to cross Kaneville Road near Lewis Road, they will have to walk along the south side of Kaneville on a sidewalk that runs behind homes whose owners are not responsible for clearing it of snow. While the city’s Public Works Department does plow that sidewalk, officials could not guarantee that it would be plowed soon enough after a snowfall to let students use it to get to and from school, reported Assistant Superintendent Donna Oberg.

“After I went there and saw where the kids would have to walk along Kaneville if the sidewalk was not clear, I decided to leave that route on the [hazardous busing route] list because it’s just not safe,” Oberg told board members. “It was a call I felt I had to make.”

District 304 will operate 40 bus routes this year to get students safely past traffic hazards that lie between them and their schools. Officials did remove two routes from the list, both of which took Mill Creek subdivision students to Mill Creek Elementary School, because King Street and Fieldstone Drive now have uninterrupted sidewalks leading to the school. “The sidewalks had gaps because they hadn’t been built across the empty lots, making kids walk in the street,” she explained. “Now that those houses have been built, the sidewalks have been completed and those walks are safe.”