Some local parents are so frustrated they can’t safely and easily drop off their children at Couchiching Heights Public School that they’re shovelling their own pathway for the kids to use.
According to Patricia Burnett-Huneault, a local daycare provider who is responsible for two children who attend C.H.P.S., parents and caregivers are not allowed to use the school parking lot in the morning to drop off students while the school bus is there, typically between 8:35 a.m. and 8:50 a.m.
Instead, some families use a dirt path—now covered in snow—that runs through the Orma Drive Parkette that connects to the school’s rear entrance.
“With the enormous amounts of snow we’ve been getting, the children haven’t been able to get through the park,” Burnett-Huneault told OrilliaMatters. “They’ve been climbing over mountains of snow, and then they get soaking wet.”
The situation is so frustrating that Burnett-Huneault and other parents have taken it upon themselves to shovel the pathway, and they want to know why the City of Orillia isn’t maintaining it during the winter.
“They know the kids use this path to get to and from school, yet nobody is maintaining it to make sure the children can use it safely,” she said. “We are trying to make a safe environment for the kids to get to school.”
Kyle Mitchell, manager of source protection and operations for the City of Orillia, says the parkette is not maintained in the winter because there is no established city trail within the parkette.
He also says the equipment used to maintain existing city trails would not be well-suited for maintaining a pathway in the winter. And even if the city did shovel the parkette, he said, it would not be able to shovel past the fence line, resulting in students still having to walk through a snow-covered schoolyard.
“There are also other walkways and pathways through the parks system that are not maintained in the winter due to similar circumstances,” Mitchell said in an emailed statement.
Sarah Kekewich, manager of communications for the Simcoe County District School Board, says parents have restricted access to the school’s parking lot during drop-off times for safety reasons.
“There is one bus that transports students to and from the school each day,” she told OrilliaMatters in an emailed statement. “In the winter, when the snowbanks cause visibility issues, the parking lot is closed from approximately 8:35 to 8:50 a.m. to enhance safety as students get off the bus and enter the school property.”
After 8:50 a.m., the parking lot is accessible to families who choose to drive their children to school. She said parents can also choose to drop their children off on Stanton Drive, where there is a school crossing guard on duty.
“To try to abide by the school’s rules of not parking in their parking lot is really tough,” said Burnett-Huneault. “The school is saying to go park at Foodland to drop your children off, but local businesses don’t want us parking in their lots either, which I can understand.”
“It just seems ridiculous that (they) don’t want us parked out front, they don’t want us to park on the paved shoulder outside of the school, and we can’t park at a business,” she continued. “It just doesn’t make sense and it’s not accommodating for a lot of families.”
