Last
September the Parents Advisory Committee (PAC) at the Ecole Oceanside
Elementary School in Parksville asked me to help establishing a crossing
guard program for what they considered to be a dangerous intersection
at one corner of the school grounds.
In past, the principal had raised the issue of liability concerns that
needed to be looked into and that was the end of the conversation.
This year, with a little bit of research and advice from another school
that had a crossing guard program this program was backed by the new
principal. The request made it as far as school district’s Operations
and Maintenance / Transportation manager according
to the PAC, where it stalled yet again.
The head of the PAC has now stopped responding to requests for an update on the progress of their project.
The strategy of Ignore Them, They’ll Go Away seems to have been
successfully adopted by many levels of government today. From the
perspective of gathering information for this site, RoadSafetyBC is the
worst, TranBC along with the RCMP are somewhere in the
middle and ICBC has been the best, although they are now beginning to
ignore e-mail requests as well.
In all cases, if you agenda matches theirs, information is forthcoming,
often surprisingly quickly. The people at RoadSafetyBC spent a lot of
effort assisting me in creating a unit on the Enhanced Road Assessment
for my ElderCollege course. However, ask if
there has been any follow up research on 2015’s B.C. Communities Road
Safety Survey to see if there have been improvements and the e-mail
enters a black hole.
At this point I would even be happy with an auto response telling me
that my message has been received. It would be a simple matter to
include information about how requests are triaged and what to do if a
response is not received within a reasonable amount
of time.
When I was working in traffic enforcement I was occasionally reminded by
the driver I was dealing with that they were the ones that paid my
wages. Yes, I did work for them but sometimes that work was not what
they wanted me to be doing. Still, they had a point
and I had an obligation. Government seems to forget this too.
On the other hand, I can imagine that with the ability to e-mail some
government contacts being so simple, many of us do it. There must be a
huge volume of e-mail to deal with and people do make mistakes.
To come full circle to the PAC request, if they considered their
crossing guard program and decided that it was the best solution, they
should be prepared to persist in the face of silence. The group should
not quit until they are either successful or are shown
that there is a better way to deal with the problem.
Story URL:
https://www.drivesmartbc.ca/government/ignore-them-theyll-go-away
—
Constable Tim Schewe (Retired)
DriveSmartBC: Where better than average road users satisfy their curiosity.