Many parents brace themselves for traffic jams during the first few days of school, it's been so chaotic for Sarah Rodriguez, she started documenting her trips.
"We leave our house 2 and a half hours early to get to school," Rodriguez said. "My daughter and I started counting down the number of lights before making it to school to help with her anxiety."
Rodriguez has a daughter attending Six Mile Cypress Charter Academy. This is the first year the school has closed off a lot where parents used to park and walk their kids to the door.
Shannon Berg is another parent who says this change is a problem.
"No parents were notified via email or phone call about this new procedure," Berg said.
Parents say the car line is twice as long and traffic is twice as bad.
"Drivers from oncoming traffic going up and over like the sidewalk down over by the ditch to go around," Rodriguez said. "I mean it's complete chaos, someone is going to get hit or killed."
"A couple of parents have left the school because of this issue," Berg said.
Other parents have been posting their concerns on social media and are proposing to start a petition for change after tirelessly trying to get answers and witnesses arguments break out between parents and staff.
"We're asking questions and we want answers," Rodriguez said."The past three days I've called and left three voice mails and no returned phone calls no return voice mails, no return emails."
Four In Your Corner reached out to the school, a spokesperson promised to investigate and emailed the following response:
"Six Mile Charter Academy is committed to providing a high quality educational environment that is safe and orderly. As it happens every year at every school during the first couple of weeks of school, the drop-off and pick-up process has been challenging. As with all schools, it takes a couple of weeks for parents to learn the processes, stagger their times, set up carpools and engage their children in after-school activities. From the school's perspective, we monitor the process very closely and determine if changes should be made.
We have not changed our pick-up or drop-off patterns, however, as a safety precaution, we no longer allow parents to forego the drop-off, pick-up line to drop off their children in the parking lot and allow them to cross the parking lot to come to school. As you can imagine, this posed a significant safety hazard that we are not willing to consider. Safety is our highest priority and we take every appropriate action available to provide a safe efficient dismissal.
We secured a Sheriff's detail to help during the first few days of school and are confident that as we continue to monitor the situation, it will, as it does every year, improve over the first couple of weeks of school. We are
looking forward to a great year and are excited to focus on academic excellence."
