The in basket: Hollace Vaughn asked Wednesday, “Do you know why the flashing lights for school zones is still activated every afternoon even though school is out on West Kingston Road for the middle and high school in Kingston?”
The out basket: Curiously, those flashing lights are controlled by the county signal shop when they are on county roads, such as West Kingston, not by the schools.
Doug Bear of Kitsap County Public Works says “Each year we get a schedule from the schools and program the lights accordingly. In this case, we either have a wrong date on the schedule, or we missed it. In either regard we will have a crew go out and look at the situation. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.”
It may no longer be blinking by now.
Wouldn’t been easier to contact the school district or the county rather than contacting the newspaper. No offense RW, I think you do a great job getting to the bottom of stuff, but unless you really had nothing to do, which I doubt, in the time it took for the writer to email you a letter and you getting to the letter and researching to find the answer, a simple phone call or maybe even an email to the acting parties could have had the problem resolved.
It is nothing new when it comes to the flashing school lights to run past the dates when school is let out. Happens all the time. It happened on Central Valley road after school got out a couple years ago and I mentioned it to one of the staff at the local school and the next day they were off. She said the calendar had not been updated. No biggie.
Now if this writers story had mentioned that the school flashing lights had still been on and the writer had gotten a school zone infraction for either driving to fast or to slow, then that would be a good question.
Is it still possible to get a school Zone Infraction if the flashing lights are on, even though everyone knows that school is no longer in Session?