Parent injured in chain-reaction crash outside Hyde Park school
A crash involving a school bus and several vehicles outside the Henry Grew School, 40 Gordon Ave. in Hyde Park this morning injured a parent standing on the sidewalk as students were arriving for the day.
The initial call to police came in around 8:15 a.m. When they arrived, they found the bus and five heavily damaged cars and SUVs - with one SUV turned sideways and on the roof of one car and the trunk lid of another, its front end on the sidewalk.
The woman on the sidewalk who was knocked to the ground was alert and conscious when EMTs arrived.
Principal Christina Michel e-mailed parents:
This morning, there was a crash in front of the school involving a school bus as well as passenger vehicles. A pedestrian was injured in the accident.
School staff and the Boston Public Schools Department of Transportation were immediately notified of the incident. Boston Police, Boston Emergency Services, and a Transportation Road Safety Supervisor responded to the scene to provide support. A Boston Public Schools crisis team is on site to support students and staff who might have witnessed the accident. We encourage anyone who might need support to speak with our school social workers or the BPS crisis team.
The Grew School and the Boston Public Schools are committed to fostering environments where all students feel safe, respected, and academically challenged.
We understand that this incident may be concerning to you, and we want to assure you that we are taking all necessary steps to ensure the safety of our students. We share this update in the interest of open and transparent communication.
Ad:
Comments
We share this update in the
Actual open and transparent communication would be sharing full details about the crash (like a narrative describing what hit what). Fluff like "we want to assure you that we are taking all necessary steps to ensure the safety of our students" is not transparency. It's propaganda. Transparency would be informing the public the exact same way you'd inform your boss, which is giving details.
sharing full details about
Er, that would be a BPD function, they're the accident investigation professionals, not BPS.
If you're hoping for deets on who was at fault
you're going to have to wait a while. Unless there's exceedingly clear security-camera footage, no one smart in the administration is going to risk describing the sequence of events.
Telling your boss what you saw or heard, well, that's outside of the public eye and so there's no risk of libel, so communications can be more open.
Photos or it couldn't happen.
Photos or it couldn't happen.
How about a video?
Video of the Henry Grew Crash
You're slipping
What, no blaming this on the Centre Street road diet?
In any case, you want pics, here are pics.
No blame here
I've been down Centre Street a few times and it seems that the cars manage pretty well. It's not as much a race track as it was in the past.
I've been censored for many
I've been censored for many things but not the Center Street road diet.
Moderated
You have been moderated.
This has been an issue for a long time!
At atleast 2 out of 3 Elementary Schools in Hyde Park ( probably throughout Boston too) , at student drop off and pick up there isn't enough space for cars to stop, buses to drive by and line up which creates daily dangerous conditions and sadly this is at risk of happening.
Boston Schools
Were built back when we had neighborhood schools.
None of them were designed for pick up and drop offs.
Most of them
Take a ride down to the Ohrenberger School in West Roxbury. It doesn't even look like a Boston school.
That’s an outlier.
And it’s sad to say this, being built in the 70s, this is a newer school compared to most.
You're right
I guess I'm just getting tired of people being absolutist/black-and-whitest when describing something. "None" is not the same as "almost none."
100%. My kids do that and it drives me nuts.
On a related note: why was the Ohrenberger designed so spaciously? Simply a matter of having more land, or was its mandate different?
Unfortunately
The pickup/drop-off line at the Ohrenberger also backs out onto the road and into traffic.
This is 2023
Even when kids *can* walk they don't because drivers are so aggro and routinely ignore school zones, cross walks and school buses.
If kids aren't walking to school, it may be less about how far they live from school and more about the conditions that our society has created that make walking unsafe.
Even “neighborhood schools” are driven to
Yup.
The Lyndon in West Roxbury — practically a neighborhood school, because the residents are wealthy enough to send their kids to parochial or private schools if the lottery doesn’t go in their favor — is full of students who are driven there even though it’s … a neighborhood school.
So while it’s absolutely true that busing needs to be faster — or even better that all schools should be funded and perform equally well — this whole canard about insisting on schools “our kids can walk to” is practically not something that is actually utilized even when available.
The hypocrisy is especially acute when the same neighborhood that pines for neighborhood schools — but drive to it anyway — grab their pitchforks before *and* after the Centre St road diet is in place ….
I missed a good show today
I usually run by the Grew around 8:45 on Thursdays. I had to shorten up, but I did see the ambulances and of course the news helicopters.
Best wishes for the injured.