Students at a Catholic school in south St. Louis are doing their part to get drivers to slow down on area roads.
St. Margaret of Scotland in the Shaw neighborhood was the first school to participate in Project STOPP. Students in kindergarten through 8th grade asked drivers to sign pledges to stop at all stop signs and gave them a red sticker to put on their dashboard as a reminder. All told, they collected about 1,300 signatures.
Michael Maher, first vice president of the Shaw Neighborhood Improvement Association, came up with Standing Together Offering Pedestrian Protection after his husband was hurt in a car crash caused by a driver who ignored a stop sign.
“There are a lot of newcomers to St. Louis in Shaw, and everyone had the comment that people think this is normal and it’s not,” he said of drivers’ failure to obey stop signs.
Maher approached St. Margaret of Scotland Principal Patrick Holley with the idea at the beginning of the year.
It was a natural fit, Holley said. A large number of the students who attend St. Margaret walk or bike to school. And at least once a week, the entire school walks five blocks to the parish church for Mass.
“People are blowing through stop signs, or people are driving very fast on 39th Street especially, so this was a way that we could not only work with our neighborhood association, but also raise some awareness that we have a vested interest in people driving safely in this neighborhood,” Holley said.
St. Margaret’s student council and its advisers, fifth grade teacher Karabeth Peterson and middle school math teacher Karen Rasure, built enthusiasm for the petition drive. They arranged for an assembly on safe driving that included teachers in cardboard car costumes racing on a course and having to stop at stop signs.
The possibility of prizes didn’t hurt either, Peterson said. The neighborhood improvement association arranged for gift cards from a local ice cream shop. And the student who gathered the most signatures got an intersection named after them for one year.
Right now, that honor belongs to 7th grader Evander Page. He walks and bikes to school and said, “Sometimes, I think [the cars] will stop and then sometimes they’ll just go right through the stop signs.” It's a situation he said is scary.
Maher said it’s hard to say whether more drivers are following the rules in Shaw due to the STOPP pledges. But he said it has been a topic of conversation at neighborhood gathering spots like the dog park.
“Which is really the goal, getting people to talk about why safe driving is important,” he said.
St. Margaret, the only school so far to participate in Project STOPP, plans to do so again next year. Maher said he is working with the advocacy organization Trailnet to expand the program to additional schools in the neighborhood and across St. Louis.
Trailnet’s 2024 crash report showed that last year was the deadliest for pedestrians on St. Louis-area roads.
