COLORADO SPRINGS — Nearly five months after a teenager hit and killed a 17-year-old girl outside Doherty High School, the city has no immediate plans to add any more school zones to protect kids.
Giorgia Trocciola was killed outside her high school in late March. Three weeks later, the city installed a school zone at Doherty High and said it would consider doing the same to protect high school students at other schools. But, despite interest from multiple districts to add school zones, the city has no plans to do so.
When Trocciola was killed, city traffic engineer Todd Frisbie said he made it a priority to install a school zone at Doherty High.
At a press conference one day after the Italian foreign exchange student was killed, Frisbie said Colorado Springs would consider reevaluating a practice of not installing crosswalks at high schools.
But as a new school year begins for students in Colorado Springs, the city hasn't installed any more school zones to protect them.
“Right now we don’t have the equipment that we need to be able to install school zones. We need poles, we need the control units, we just don’t have the material right now.," Frisbie told News 5.
It's also an issue of funding. At $10,000 each, installing five lighted polls outside Doherty High cost the city $50,000. That price tag is part of the reason most middle and high school students in the city don’t have the same protections as students at Doherty.
Each public elementary school in the city has a school zone, but aside from a handful of cases, all that protects older children around their schools are crosswalks.
"Some of the thought behind not doing it at middle schools and high schools is that older students, teenagers, know the rules of the road better, and can assess the situation better than an elementary school student," Frisbie said.
But teenagers are also new drivers, prone to distraction. Trocciola died when another teen hit her while running a red light, police said. He was charged with Careless Driving Resulting in Death, but given that he is a minor, his name was not released and it's unclear what punishment he received. Police have not said whether the student was driving while distracted.
"Doherty just happens to be where it happened, but there are ticking time bombs all over the city in the built environment where that can happen anywhere," said Nick Raven, who sits on the Citizen Transportation Advisory Board.
He wants to see the city look for other ways to improve pedestrian and cyclist safety around schools, other than adding lights.
“We need leadership that says like, 'We need to make this built environment, multi-modal transportation, more effective for everyone.' Because if we start solving that, this stuff starts to just magically go away on its own,” Raven said.
But there isn't enough funding to fix everything that needs fixing all at once. Aside from school zones, traffic engineers have 180 projects and 70 intersections in need of safety upgrades, Frisbie said. His team decides which projects to fund based on which will have the greatest impact. And there are more accidents at busy intersections around town than outside schools.
In fact, crashes outside schools aren’t all that common. A look at city data between 2012 and 2021 shows among crashes between drivers and pedestrians, the most dangerous intersection near a school in Colorado Springs is outside Palmer High. During that nine-year span, the intersection saw 42 crashes.
That doesn’t mean any of those crashes involved kids or happened during the school year, but the number does indicate the level of risk they face getting to and from school.
Comparatively, the next school with the most crashes is Carmel Community Middle School with six crashes over those nine years.
Panorama Middle had five crashes. Galileo School of Math and Science and West Middle each had four crashes.
"There have been requests from other school zones, primarily District 20, 2, and 11 have asked for additional school zones. We're going to look at those requests,” Frisbie said.
But, he said, just because they've requested a school zone doesn’t mean they’ll be first in line. There are criteria to consider —
"So we'll look at schools that tend to be on major roads, that tend to have maybe more walkers than another school. We'll look at the population, you know, the size of the school. We'll also look at sort of equity spread, you know, spreading it out. We want to make sure we're capturing schools all across the city and not just focusing on one district," Frisbie explained.
When presented with the city's crash data outside schools, Mayor Yemi Mobolade said he considers school safety personal, as he has school-aged kids, but noted it's too soon to say how much funding he’ll allocate toward school safety projects in his upcoming budget.
“It’s important to know, we have more needs than we have money to pay for it but public safety is still up there as a top priority,” the mayor said.
While the decision of which city middle or high school gets a school zone will be based largely on funding, there’s no timeline for when that will happen.
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