Curlew Creek Elementary wins safety award

PALM HARBOR

They call her Sister Earth. She appears frequently at Curlew Creek Elementary School preaching her message of health, safety and conservation dressed in a costume resembling our planet. Jill Jackson's Sister Earth costume is made of hula hoops, duct tape and dominoes in addition to blue and green fabric. "I just can't do anything halfway," she said. Jackson, 43, of Clearwater is a volunteer and the parent of a second-grader and a third-grader at the school. She is also the force behind the "Walking Wednesdays" program, which helped Curlew Creek win the first Judge Karl B. Grube Safe Kids Coalition Extra Mile Award on Wednesday.

The award recognizes the school's efforts to promote safety while walking and biking to school.

Every Wednesday, Curlew Creek students are encouraged to walk or bike to school and groups of children are chaperoned, by Jackson and other parents, on a quarter-mile walk from a nearby park to Curlew Creek Elementary.

In addition to the weekly walks, students created posters emphasizing the importance of safety while walking and filmed a public service announcement, which will be shown at the school and on its Web site.

"Through their 'Wednesday Walks' program, Curlew Creek employees and volunteers encouraged the kids to keep practicing safety," said Grube, a Pinellas County judge. "That's what we're after. They really went the extra mile."

The award was presented by the Florida Suncoast Safe Kids Coalition. The coalition is grass roots effort of more than 100 organizations in Pinellas, Manatee, Sarasota, Polk and Pasco counties to help to fight the unintentional injury of children.

Grube has been involved with the coalition for nine years and helped to get local schools involved in the International Walk to School Day, which takes place the first Wednesday in October.

Several schools, like Curlew Creek, have taken the effort a step further by organizing regular walking and biking programs. Belcher Elementary in Largo recently started a Walking School Bus program, where parents take turns chaperoning nearly 100 kids walking to school.

A report released last month by Transportation for America and the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership, listed the Tampa Bay area as the second-worst metro area in America for pedestrian injuries. Safe Kids is trying to lower these injuries to children.

"Here in Pinellas, thanks to Safe Kids, we have reduced pedestrian injury and death among children by 50 percent," Lealman Fire District Capt. Jim Millican, chairman of the coalition, said Wednesday at the presentation, attended by the 690-member student body, teachers, staff and volunteers.

Curlew Creek principal Robert McFadden is proud of his students' efforts to stay safe while improving their health.

"The award is a real feather in the cap for our students," he said. "They worked really hard for this."