School board approves new bus stop

The Hot Springs County School Board voted unanimously on Sept. 16 to approve the previously proposed bus stop at 421 North Highway 20, but not before Board Treasurer Joe Martinez offered a few longer-term suggestions.

“I made a point this morning, going to town and back home, to take a look at this,” Martinez said. “When these requests come in, it would be nice if we had some more visuals to go with them, from the actual bus stops, looking both directions, so we can see what they’re seeing.”

Martinez cited the familiarity of fellow board trustees Clay Van Antwerp and Will Farrell, as well as Board Vice-Chair Sherman Skelton, with the road in question, as he expressed some mild concerns.

“There’s just a slight hill,” Martinez said. “That stop is actually less than a quarter of a mile from that slight hill. It’s the old Jackman place.”

Although Martinez opined that, “for the most part, things will be okay,” he nonetheless predicted that drivers of smaller vehicles would have more difficulty seeing that bus stop soon enough to stop “in a fairly short distance,” since “we have a lot of distracted drivers these days.”

By contrast, Martinez is less concerned with drivers of larger trucks, since “they sit up high enough, and that hill is not that big, that they could actually see that (bus stop) pretty quick.”

Martinez elaborated that he was voicing his concerns less because he was worried that this particular bus stop would pose significant problems, and more because he’d prefer any future additional bus stops to afford a more visually oriented process of vetting, to accompany the recommendations.

Board Chair Jennifer Axtell asked Superintendent Dustin Hunt, “When a request for a bus stop is put in, who goes out, checks and says, ‘This is a great spot’?”

When Hunt told Axtell that such duties fall under the purview of the district’s transportation supervisor, Axtell checked to confirm that Barbara Allen had indeed visited the location herself, so she could deem it “a safe spot.”

“I know we had (a bus stop) in a similar area, prior to Barb, and we changed it because it was becoming a safety hazard,” Axtell said.

“I think that was Wakely Corner,” Martinez said. Martinez nonetheless made the motion to approve the proposed bus stop, and neither he nor any other board trustees raised any further questions before their unanimous vote.