Parents want solution
Parking at school is out of hand
GLENVALE State School parents were furious to see council staff out in the rain issuing parking warnings while they rushed to pick up their children from school this week.
Traffic congestion has reached peak levels at the Glenvale Rd school where there are less than 55 car parks for almost 800 students.
Yesterday in Parliament Member for Toowoomba South David Janetzki called on the education minister to provide funding to resolve this safety issue.
Mother-of-four Melissa Greensill said she was livid when she saw parking inspectors standing in the rain handing out what she initially thought were parking fines on Tuesday afternoon.
“About 200 parents park in a paddock across the road from the school but the recent rain has turned it into a mud pit,” she said.
“On Tuesday afternoon it was raining and parents were parking anywhere they could to get their children - it was frantic - and to see the warnings was the last straw for me.”
School pick-up and dropoffs are particularly congested at Glenvale State School because there is only one entrance to the school, what parents describe as an “inadequate pick-up and drop-off zone”, no connecting footpaths for children to safely walk to school and it is a major road clocking more than 2200 vehicle movements per day.
Mrs Greensill and Mr Janetzki have been working to highlight the need for extra car parking before a child is seriously injured or killed.
Last year, Mrs Greensill collected almost 400 signatures for a petition which Mr Janetzki presented to the state government.
During the November state election campaign, Mr Janetzki was able to secure a $500,000 funding commitment if the LNP was elected while the Labor candidate for Toowoomba South Susan Krause told media that the Labor government had also been “working on a solution”.
However, when Mr Janetzki’s office wrote to the minister last month to question this “solution”, no response was received.