October 2016
This month’s featured narrative is about a school-wide intervention with a rural primary school to address the safety of students when boarding school buses and crossing roads.
The narrative describes a cross-section of responses across all three components of the whole school approach. Police worked with a range of partners besides the school, including the bus companies, road controlling authority and media. As a result, there is now a new bus pick-up point, a better trained school patrol, improved visibility on the road, and a more safety-conscious community.
A lesson learned from this intervention is that the goals could have been written in SMART format. So the goal ‘the speed of traffic outside the school will be reduced’ would look more like: ‘the number of vehicles on [name of road] exceeding [kph] on [days of week] between [times] will reduce from [number taken from baseline data] to [number desired] over [length of period for behavior change to occur]’.