Brookland News has begun a new form of articles – known as opions – where a story that displays “OPINION” in the title means that story isn’t necessarily fact focused and will show the opinion from each side of a story. The opinions are not those of Brookland News.
Brookland, AR– Each and every year traffic gets worse for those trying to go to school or drop off a student at Brookland Public Schools. But is there a way to fix it?
Three schools, one district and a two lane road. What is the problem?
A two lane road, known as School Street goes through a large part of the city of Brookland, and it happens to be the road that those trying to get to the school have to go through. But if you look at it, there’s no way to expand it.
Houses are built on each side of the road, which leaves no room to expand. And to be exact, East School St. is not the problem. In fact, cars often use that road to turn around because the turn lane is so far backed up to get on School St. from Highway 49 Business.
So, it’s quicker to get from E. School St. to West School St.
The City of Brookland has done close to everything to limit traffic. During the times of arrival and dismissal West School St. is used as a one way until Bernis Street to help with traffic flow.
For those that have no clue what your reading, here’s a image from Google Earth that shows the area and where the schools are.
Yes, I understand that map is a lot, but you can always reference back to it.
So is the problem that there just wasn’t as many students when the campuses were built.
I mean, to think that the high school campus was where every student in the district once is unimaginable. Then came the elementary, middle and now primary schools.
The school is growing every year, and has over 3,000 students between the elementary, middle and high school.
All of that – plus the need of land- has led Brookland Public Schools to build a new building to hold third and 4th graders.
The new intermittent school will be located on Dixie Road after the Woods Chapel Baptist Church. The building will be 85,000 square feet and two stories.
With that, there also taking up traffic issues for the building. Brett Bunch told Jackson Mitchell in June and said that they will be placing round-a-bouts to limit traffic, and using other methods to limit the jam.
But for now, there’s really not much of a fix. I mean, by the middle of the year, traffic is usually not so backed up and comes to what most call normal.
Each and every student/ parent of a student that attends Brookland Public Schools knows what the problem is (a two-lane-road and a growing school), but there’s just no immediate fix.
For now, parents have done what they can to figure out a route that gets to campus first.
