Brandy Lint volunteered to spend her evening at the San Antonio City Council meeting tonight to speak on our behalf about the dangerous intersections in front of the school. She also had a conversation with a representative of the SA Transportation and Capital Improvements Department, who will be at our community meeting tomorrow. Below are her remarks.

Thanks, Brandy for representing us!

Good evening,

Mr. Mayor, Council Members. I appreciate the opportunity to address you tonight, not as a business person in the community, but rather as a concerned parent speaking on behalf of other concerned parents, looking to our city leaders to take action.

For two years now, I’ve made the daily trek to drop-off children at Brandeis High School. Over that time, I have observed a daily traffic nightmare that can only be described in one word – DANGEROUS.

I’m not here to point fingers at a design flaw or talk about what could have been done in the past, what I am here to talk about is what SHOULD and MUST be done to protect the thousands of students who enter that school each day and the thousands more who will follow.

The reality is there are simply no safe exits when leaving the parking lot of the school. The one road to enter and exit the building has become one of the busiest roads in our area – Kyle Seale.

This has become a thorough fair for not only students but thousands of community members who live in the area trying to access 1604 from the surrounding neighborhoods. In doing so, many of these drivers have complete disregard for the school zone.

On any given day, people speed through the 25 mile an hour zone going 30, 40, even 50 miles an hour to get to their destination. They zip around the line of cars waiting to turn in or turn out and many have absolutely no idea there are two poorly labeled crosswalks the students are trying to across from to get to school.

The thru traffic does not have so much as a stop sign they are required to abide by so that a student can safely cross, and one of the crosswalks – where the sidewalk ends and forces students to cross – is coming off a blind curve in which many times you can’t see the student until it’s too late. Unfortunately, we saw how dangerous these crosswalks are this past Friday when a 9th-grade student was trying to walk home from school. He was hit by the car and while banged up and transported to the hospital, he survived. My fear is that the next student will not be as lucky.

I was told just minutes before this meeting began that the installation of a traffic light is a budget item to be considered at your meeting tomorrow. I applaud this effort and ask you not only vote in favor of this item but that you push to have this light installed quickly. While we all know this can take more than a year, sometimes up to 18 months to complete – I ask that you order the temporary installation of flashing stop signs to better control traffic and protect our children.

While I appreciate the effort to place a flashing sign in front of the school on Monday to tell folks not to TEXT AND DRIVE, we need more than that to save a child’s life. Thank you.

Please plan to be at Brandeis tomorrow night at 6:00 for the community meeting.

And tell your friends. It’s clear to everyone that the Brandeis community wants something done soon. But we have to work together to find the best solution.