Traffic accidents involving children have nearly tripled in the Clark County School District.

What will it take for this to finally stop?

Plus... A stunning memorial honoring Nevada veterans sits in storage.

How you can help make it available for the public to see.

That's this week on Nevada Week.

♪♪ Support for Nevada Week is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

Several families across the Las Vegas Valley are mourning the loss of their children after motor vehicles hit and killed them in recent months.

The Clark County School District says drivers have hit more than 160 children this school year, up from 56 children this same time last year.

So what's behind the surge, and how can it be stopped?

For that, we bring in Deputy Chief Jose Hernandez with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department; Rebecca Dirks Garcia, Board Member for the Nevada PTA; Lieutenant Mike Campbell with the Clark County School District Police Department; and Jennifer Grube, Coordinator for Safe Routes to School.

Thank you all for joining us on this important topic.

Rebecca, I want to start with you.

You have been a parent in the Clark County School District for 20 years.

Where do you start in helping reduce these numbers?

(Rebecca Dirks Garcia) I think we start by recognizing that everybody has a part to play.

Whether you're a parent teaching your kids how to be safe when they walk or bike to school, whether you're a driver in a school zone, whether you have kids or not, if you're on the roads, if you are part of our community, you have a part to play in how do we make this better, because this year is not okay.

It's-- As a mom, seeing one more kid, one more life lost, it's heartbreaking.

(Mike Campbell) I'm a parent myself.

I have twin eight-year-old girls.

They go to Clark County School District.

My wife is a principal at one of those schools.

And it's imperative as parents that we learn to have those tough discussions and that we go out there and we model the behavior for them.

That means going for the bike rides, going for the walks, and not just talking about what could happen, but explaining what that is when it does happen.

It should be like a visceral response when you think about walking out into a road without looking.

It shouldn't just be, oh, I need to look left, right, left.

I need to understand what could happen to me if I'm struck by a car, which is, you could die.

-Jennifer, what do you think about the messaging?

Is it graphic enough to get through?

Does it need to be a little bit harsher?

(Jennifer Grube) Well, that's come up several, on several occasions, the topic, if it should be a serious and graphic thing.

For the most part, I think no, but like Lieutenant Campbell mentioned, like, you have to have those honest conversations and that the end result could lead to death.

A lot of kids play chicken with cars.

They're playing around when they shouldn't be playing around.

So I think it's important to know the consequences of what can happen in and around traffic conditions.

-Are you seeing more children playing chicken around cars?

I've seen people talk about this on Facebook, but it's hard to imagine.

(Jose Hernandez) I've personally not not seen it.

What I have seen is I think children, again, being children, darting into traffic.

And again, think about their sense of danger and perhaps they don't understand how fast the vehicle is traveling.

And so when we have those conversations with our children and we say, Hey, this is what could happen.

You could get hit by a vehicle, and the vehicle is going to win.

You will not survive.

I think we have to have those tough conversations with our children-- Stay on the sidewalks.

Use the crosswalks.

-And with our older kids, to follow up on that, just unplugging and making sure that they're being aware of their surroundings.

And that's what we see a lot of times with the older kids, just, you know, it's basic, just like the basic thing of looking left, right, and left, but just getting your head up and out of your devices is huge in our middle school and high schools.

-I notice that a lot.

I drive across town for my child to attend a magnet school where bussing isn't an option.

So every day, I'm back and forth in that school zone at a high school, and there's a ton of kids.

This year, I think more than ever, I'm seeing electric scooters and bikes, more than one kid on them, not a helmet in sight, and half the time they're also on a phone.

They're on the sidewalk.

They're not obeying basic traffic safety rules.

I think it's because a lot of them don't know them.

They don't think that they have to comply with-- When I was a kid, you actually had to take the bike safety, like, little demonstrations and classes.

I know those were not common for my kids growing up.

-They were required?

-In my schools, we had them as kids.

And I went to 10 schools in 12 years, so I went to a lot of different schools across the country.

My kids never had that growing up here in CCSD.

I have four kids, 20 years as a parent in CCSD.

And even though my kids have for large chunks of time been non bussers, they were under the two-mile zone, they did not receive really substantial instruction from a outside perspective beyond Mom and Dad of how to behave walking or riding a bike to school or a scooter.

And so I think that just the not understanding and then also that level of distraction.

And it's not just middle and high school kids.

You've got elementary school kids with phones, and they're even smaller and harder to see.

So that becomes a really great challenge, and that's why I say that it requires all of us to do different things to move the needle and also to not continue to accept that school zones are a mess and they've been a mess for a really long time, and yet we continue to build schools in the same way that we know is going to be a mess of traffic.

Why?

We know these school zones are a mess.

A lot of CCSD schools do not take advantage of technology to have easier pick-up/drop-off zones by using apps and other devices that I know a lot of charter schools use that to move the traffic faster in patterns.

And so I also think we have to not discount the fact that there are logistical problems with zoning when you allow a charter to come in across the street from an existing CCSD school and then all of a sudden they're dismissing at the same time.

My own kid's school, at one point, CCSD put a middle, a high school-- excuse me --a middle school and two elementary schools that shared a fence on Lake Mead and Lamont, they put the dismissal times 20 minutes apart.

How is that not going to be a recipe for disaster?

I mean, I will tell you my biggest thing I'll celebrate when I no longer have a kid in K-12 is not entering a school zone.

[laughter] -How would you respond to that?

What kind of technology can be used?

Is it up to each individual school?

-I can't really speak on what each school can do, because as far as I know they have their own budget.

They have their own issues.

I do agree with you, the school zones, I've been here for 18 years, they're only getting more congested.

Parents fearing dropping-- or letting their kids walk to school or bike to school.

A lot of them are driving them.

A lot of these schools were built to be walked to, but we live in a real world where parents also have to go to work, you know?

We can't just, I'm going to be late, Chief, because I'm going to be walking my kids to school today.

That's not reality.

There are discussions being talked about, about new schools being built, where we're being brought in and looking at traffic flow--ingress, egress, drop off points.

We're working with Transportation currently to talk about, you know, Which way should the busses take?

Which way do the kids usually walk?

And we work with Jennifer on, How do we get the kids safely to the school, biking, walking, and then where should the parents go?

And those three different things have to intermingle with the roadway traffic that's already going to exist.

How the staff is going to assist, if they can, with the manpower that they have or the funding that they have or just like some of these older schools take, for instance, like Hummel Elementary has one roadway, and there is nowhere else to go around it.

There is nothing that can be done.

There is no place we can put another parking lot.

And that's where these infrastructure challenges start to really become a problem.

-Jennifer, I want you to jump in here.

There are a lot of topics you can talk about within what we just discussed, but I want to start with parents and the rules that they must follow in school zones.

I believe you told me off camera that at the beginning of the school year you will go out to different schools and you will talk to parents as they are dropping off their kids, and what are you telling them that they are not aware of?

-We actually have a combined force.

We work with Clark County School District Police Department on this as well.

And this is not just available at the beginning of the school year.

It's available all year long.

Schools can request us to come out, and we help to educate drivers of active school zone laws.

So the big ones that we see currently are parking too close to an intersection and/or a crosswalk.

We see a lot of vehicles parked actually on crosswalks.

So by law, they're to be given 20 feet so that our students are visible and our littles are visible, even our high school students.

Another one, other than parking where they shouldn't be parking is doing illegal U-turns, right?

-Which we see the messaging for that.

-Yeah.

U-turns a lot, double parking, passing.

There's a lot of passing going on in school zones.

So one car might be stopped for a kid who should be using the intersection or crosswalk, but he's mid-block crossing, jaywalking, and so the second car might not see that student.

And that's the importance of not passing in a school zone.

So we help distribute banners to schools that will just give the message across as well if there's no additional signage of, Please don't pass and Don't do U-turns.

But for the most part, we just all have to do our part in keeping the school zones safe.

-There's a specific case in October, Haylee Ryan, 12 years old, riding a bike and hit by the school bus.

She was in the bike lane and then veered out.

Will you tell us what happened and who-- I know we don't want to place blame, but what could have been done differently to prevent that?

-Sure.

This is very much an ongoing investigation.

In this particular situation, so Haylee was driving, was riding her bicycle.

There was a vehicle parked in the bike lane.

And so-- -Which is illegal.

-You are not allowed to park in bike lanes.

It's illegal.

-But it happens.

-Well, I think we see it more than we would like.

It happens all the time.

And so just in that particular stretch of road, you can, you can see numerous vehicles parked along the, along the bike lane.

So vehicle is parked in the bike lane.

She drives around the vehicle to go past it.

And as she's passing that vehicle that's parked, there's two busses, two school busses, driving side by side, each in their lane, their appropriate lane.

And as they're driving past the parked vehicle, and obviously Haley who's on her bicycle, this is where the collision occurs.

So it all simultaneously, as she's moving around the vehicle, the bus is coming right alongside her, and a collision occurs.

Very, very tragic.

-I think it's interesting, too, that initially, when you see these events happen, we're angry.

Everybody's angry.

We want to look for who is at fault for this, you know, and that's a natural reaction for human beings.

It's a defense mechanism for everybody.

Who can I attack so I can feel better and move on throughout my day.

This is not one of those cases.

It was a situation where, yeah, we have people that park in bike lanes, but the cycling law allows cyclists to use the entire lane.

But like Rebecca said, we don't have kids, and how you said, they're not developed.

Kids don't develop until they're 25.

They're bright.

So how can we expect them to know exactly all the traffic laws?

Whether we have 10, 15 classes, are they going to retain that information?

We need to slow down.

We need to do all these things.

All those things were probably happening.

Nobody had any intent to hurt anybody.

If you look at the parking situation at that school, in front of the school there is a storage lane that allows parking with a bike lane next to it.

Right down the street less than 100 yards, it looks pretty similar, but the bike lane is next to the curb with a buffer zone next to the bike lane.

Some of these parents don't even understand that that's a bike lane, because over just one block down, it's completely different.

And Vegas is a lot like that.

We go from overdevelopment to underdevelopment through a course of a mile, and especially with a school district where we're trying to fit a school into a property that was purchased probably 50 years ago, and the entire area around it has been built up.

It's not just the school district, I can say, because if we took an account, and this is actually being done now, we're meeting, all the traffic engineers are meeting, there's groups that are talking about this.

And this happened due to the Arbor View incident.

And there were so many different parameters and things that could have been there that could have done something different or if a police officer was out there, et cetera, but-- -Will you remind our viewers of that incident?

-Yeah.

Arbor View, at the end of last school year, a high school senior was crossing in a crosswalk and was struck by a DUI driver.

It was not during an active school zone.

It was midday.

Our officers are generally inside the school at that time to focus on the students, because we have 2- 3,000 students at a school with one or two officers in a high school, and that's where our focus is.

Is it her fault?

No.

Is it-- It's this driver that we cannot control people's behavior.

We can, we can have ten times more police officers, but unless we have an officer standing outside of everybody's door trying to figure out, Hey, are you-- Did you drink or use narcotics before you got in your car?

It's impossible.

And it's very unfortunate, sad.

It's tragic.

I mean, this stuff is happening in our own communities with our own students.

We all have friends or family members that this is impacted by.

None of us can say that we don't care.

Out of all the people that you have, I think we have people here that stay up at night when these incidents happen, where we're crying, where we're trying to figure out, What are we not doing?

Who are we not yelling at loud enough?

Who are we not begging for something to change?

-Impaired driving is what is suspected in the death of 12-year-old Christopher Suarez, who was hit as he was crossing the road near Rancho High School.

When that happened, Governor Joe Lombardo talked about, if there is a special session in the legislature, he would like to get through his crime bill, which has stiffer DUI penalties.

Is that what's going to help solve this issue?

Is that what's needed?

-Well, I think that, sure, that laws absolutely help.

They-- There are several laws now that we utilize every day, specifically when it comes to DUIs.

But I think what it, what's really going to help is that as a law enforcement community, that this is the number one priority.

And so as these, unfortunately, as these incidents continue to happen, we cannot lose sight of how critical it is that we address these with the laws that are available to us now.

And so I think so long as we're doing that and we're keeping it as a priority, we're going to make progress.

-Uniform enforcement of-- are you seeing some people not get-- -When we, when we look at some of these incidents, right, and we look back at history and we look at a person who's been arrested or previous arrests for DUI, one can't help but wonder why.

What happened?

What happened on these particular cases that we're yet again dealing with someone who is involved in a collision who is DUI?

And so certainly there are some questions, but I think it goes beyond that.

It's that personal responsibility of every person to understand that every time an impaired driver gets into a vehicle is a potential death waiting to happen.

-Last topic.

Jennifer, you start with this one, and then feel free to add in.

The e-bikes and the e-scooters, what do people not understand about them?

Why do they continue to be involved in so many accidents?

-I think that the community just might not understand the classifications of e-bikes and e-scooters, of the speed in which they go, the weight in which they are--they're very heavy--and just basically the rules of the road, in general, when it comes to not just e-bikes and e-scooters, but wheeled devices, in general.

-How do they not know?

-There's a lot to know.

And again, we're talking kids here.

So if we're going to try to teach someone, it'd probably be the parents, because the parents are buying these items.

And they're not cheap.

I mean, especially the ones that go 30, 40, 50 miles an hour.

If it's over 750 watts as a bicycle, it's not a bicycle anymore.

If it doesn't have pedals that spin, it's not considered a bicycle.

There's a lot of those out there we're considering motorcycles or off-highway vehicles, and those are like the biggest threat to safety right now in our school zones across the valley in all jurisdictions, in all cities, where there's large groups driving recklessly, they're tearing up parks, et cetera.

And while that's property damage, I mean a lot of these, nearly half the kids that are at fault for the crashes that we're seeing in our school district school zones are on e-devices, on e-scooters, on the bikes.

If you're under 18, you know, the law now says you have to wear a helmet.

That's not being done.

It's a fresh law.

It's going to take time.

But again, the speed of those vehicles, we're already having enough issues with the kids that are pushing the scooters, that are riding regular bicycles under their own power.

Now you're adding a whole other category of having to be so skilled to understand how to stop fast enough, how to maneuver around things, and that doesn't even factor in when you start adding more kids on devices that they're not supposed to be on.

It should be one person to one device.

And nobody thinks about the other things with that is like, is that device-- How much weight can that device hold?

And everything has a weight.

So if you add another person, you're probably over the weight.

It might break.

But on the thing with traffic safety is, if something pops out, if a car pops out or a person's crossing and you're doing 35 or so with another person on your e-bike, those brakes on that bicycle are only made to stop the weight that is recommended.

So if you add another 150 pounds to it and an unskilled driver who doesn't have any helmets on, it's just an absolute recipe for disaster.

-And so the e-bike and e-scooter issue is something that we have an entire show on.

And so let's run that part of this interview next week.

In the meantime, thank you all for joining us.

-Thank you.

-Looking ahead now to Veterans Day.

On November 11th is when the mayor's Fund for Las Vegas LIFE, an independent nonprofit that supports city initiatives, will kick off a fundraising campaign to relocate the Nevada State Veterans Memorial to the Thunderbird Family Sports Complex in Northwest Las Vegas.

Right now, the memorial, which features 18 larger than life bronze statues honoring American military service from the Revolutionary War through present day, sits in storage.

That's because its former home, the aging Grant Sawyer State Office Building near downtown Las Vegas, is permanently closed.

Once relocated, campaign organizers say the memorial will serve as the centerpiece of a larger gathering space with an amphitheater and an open-air promenade.

Instrumental in the creation of this plan were Francis Allen-Palenske, City of Las Vegas Ward 4 Councilwoman; and Brendan Vargas, Retired U.S.

Air Force Senior Master Sergeant.

They join us now.

Welcome to Nevada Week, and thank you for joining us.

-Thank you.

-So, Brendan, will you start off, because I believe you were the one who first became aware of this issue of there's a memorial and where does it go?

(Brendan Vargas) Right.

And, you know, I can't take credit for getting the petition going.

The petition was started.

I found out about the petition to basically keep the veteran memorial, State Veteran Memorial here in Las Vegas, as opposed to moving it to Boulder City.

No knock against Boulder City.

They've done an outstanding job in hosting both the State Veteran Cemetery and the State Veteran Home, but there are a lot of veterans here in Las Vegas.

We wanted to keep the memorial here in Las Vegas.

I reached out to the councilwoman's office.

There's some personal relationships I had there.

And then when Councilwoman found out about it, she was like, Let's go.

Let's make this happen.

-Why was this an important issue to you?

(Francis Allen-Palenske) Well, the folks in the Northwest, we are uniquely situated about halfway between Creech, halfway between Nellis.

We have a lot of active duty military in the area in the Northwest and a lot of veterans, so it seemed like a very appropriate final place for it.

And you also told me off camera that your father-- -Ah.

Go Army!

Veteran, very proud veteran.

And he's passed now, but I know he'd be very proud that we in the Northwest are the new stewards.

-What do you think of this memorial in particular, Brendan?

When you see it, it stretches all the way from the Revolutionary War to present day.

-It's impressive.

When you look at the numbers, the numbers themselves are quite impressive.

There's about 225,000 people in the state of Nevada that have some type of tie to the military, whether it's the 207,000 veterans that call Nevada home, whether it's the active duty service members we have stationed in the southern and northern parts of the state, whether it's the Reserve units or the Nevada National Guard, which have constantly and consistently supported the nation's military, both at home and abroad, and more importantly, the family members that support their members in uniform.

This memorial is a tribute to their service.

And furthermore, when you look at Nevada, Nevada has a rich military history.

You're talking 161 years of answering the call to duty since statehood in 1864, so this memorial also serves as a tribute to that Battle Born spirit that Nevadans have carried with them wherever they've served and wherever they fought.

-Currently, those bronze statues, 18 of them, are in storage.

When will they be placed, and what will it take to make that happen?

-Go ahead.

-No, please.

-Well, we're hoping by 2026, by fall of 2026, that we're going to have the memorial completely open, and then, obviously, all the statues will be placed.

I mean, it's going to look like it did at the Grant Sawyer Building, but on a much bigger scale.

We have more room through putting an amphitheater there.

So again, this is going to give veterans not just a place to pay their respects, but a place where we can do things on Veterans Day, maybe on Memorial Day.

It's giving us a place where we can hold our celebrations, because we'll have the amphitheater and we'll have other things there that allow us to really, like, make good use of this.

-How much is it going to cost?

-$10 million.

It's got a big price tag.

It does.

-How are you going to get that money?

-We are going to ask the people of Nevada for their generosity.

The governor's commitment to help raise half of that, it's going to happen.

I'm confident.

We've had such a warm reception from the veterans community.

People have just embraced us, embraced the project, and embraced the capital campaign.

-And here's the one thing I'll tell you: This is a very military-friendly state.

I talked about Boulder City earlier on.

And you look at what they do in Boulder City.

If you go down some of the main roads, they have, you know, photos of their service members from Boulder City there.

If you look at what they do in Henderson, what they do in North Las Vegas, and, more importantly, what they do in the city of Las Vegas, this is a very veteran-friendly, a very military-friendly area, very military-friendly state.

So we know there are a lot of supporters out there.

We just need to get them all together to help make this memorial a reality.

-And then last thing, Councilwoman.

When it was at the Grant Sawyer Building, how much access did the public have to it?

-It was relatively limited, because that access, that building was secure.

It was a state building.

They had gates out front, and they would close at five o'clock and wouldn't open until nine.

It was government hours.

So it never hosted a Veteran's Day event.

It never hosted a Memorial Day event.

We're going to change that, and it's going to be the best place on the American West Coast to celebrate those holidays together.

-Ward 4 Councilwoman Francis Allen-Palenske and Brendan Vargas, thank you both so much for joining Nevada Week.

-Thank you, Amber.

-And thank you for watching.

For any of the resources discussed in this show, including how you can report traffic concerns in CCSD school zones, go to vegaspbs.org/nevadaweek.

And I'll see you next week on Nevada Week.

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