Clark County commissioners have been presented with dozens of proposals aimed at curbing the rise in crashes that injured students on their way to and from schools.
The 75 recommendations presented last week range from aspirational long-term projects — developing dedicated paths connecting neighborhoods to schools and new state laws, among them — to immediate short-term wins like repainting faded crosswalks and replacing missing or damaged street signs.
Nineteen of the proposals are intended to be enacted or initiated by Aug. 10, the start of the new school year. They include improving traffic safety education efforts in school communities, allowing principals to request crosswalk flashers be re-timed and increasing traffic enforcement officer presence around schools.
The report was prepared by the School Traffic Safety Working Group, a coalition of more than 90 education, law enforcement and traffic experts in Clark County.
The findings follow an abnormally dangerous year for student pedestrians. Collisions involving kids increased to 427 in the 2025-26 school year, up from 120 the school year prior, according to data compiled by school district police.
School police have previously said part of the increase is due to stronger data collection practices among Southern Nevada law enforcement agencies.
Still, local officials see room for improvement.
Clark County School District Superintendent Jhone Ebert called the rise in student pedestrian crashes “a difficult and tragic communitywide problem” in an emailed statement Wednesday. She added that the recommendations will be discussed Aug. 5 at a Clark County School Board work session.
“CCSD will do everything we can to educate and encourage students, families and community members to put down their phones, pay attention to the road, and follow traffic safety laws,” Ebert said.
New laws pitched
Part of the report outlines the need to modernize Nevada’s e-device laws.
Crashes involving e-devices, such as e-bikes and e-scooters, accounted for nearly half of all student collisions, the report said.
Yet state laws governing e-devices are not keeping up with rapidly evolving transportation technology, according to Andrew Bennett, director of the Clark County Office of Traffic Safety. He added that a patchwork of ordinances that vary between jurisdictions compose Southern Nevada’s e-device regulations.
“We have kids, very young kids, that are on motorcycles and their parents might think that they’re on an e-bike,” Bennett said. “It would be helpful having clearer definitions of what these devices are.”
The report recommends two new state statutes to clearly define electric motorcycles and other high-power electric devices. It adds other ideas to extend DUI and impound authority to e-bikes and electric motorcycles.
The report also calls for a statewide helmet law tiered by both age and the risk of the device a kid is riding. Children under 11 would be banned from riding e-devices on public roads, while older children could ride various e-devices after earning a state safety certificate, the report proposes.
“When the student is at fault (in a crash), it largely had to do with not yielding the right of way and not operating the vehicle in a safe manner,” Bennett said. “Ensuring that there’s a level-set knowledge of rules of the road would be vital to reducing this number of kids that are hit on their way to or from school.”
According to the report, “proposed changes to Nevada’s state laws regarding e-devices are in development for the next legislative session.”
Walking school buses
One of the more visible immediate recommendations that will hit the Las Vegas Valley streets come August are walking school buses and bike trains.
These programs would enable groups of students, likely in elementary school, to walk or bike to campus together under adult supervision, according to Andrew Bennett, director of the Clark County Office of Traffic Safety.
The idea isn’t entirely new for Southern Nevada. Three elementary schools in 2019 had walking school bus programs funded through the Nevada Department of Transportation, the Las Vegas Review-Journal previously reported.
Walking school buses give kids safety in numbers and boost their daily physical activity levels, according to Sheila Janofsky, who helped secure grants for the 2019 walking school buses. Plus, she added, kids find it fun to walk to school with their friends.
“We see tragedies every year with kids on their way to school, so the idea of having an escorted formal group that walks with a trained adult is something that can really make it a lot safer for kids,” said Janofsky, a professor-in-residence at UNLV’s School of Public Health.
Anecdotal evidence also shows that walking school buses encourage kids to go to school and help them release excess energy so they enter the classroom ready to learn, Janofsky added.
Though the COVID-19 pandemic spurred the disappearance of walking school buses, Janofsky said, district concerns about injury liability also played a role.
“I don’t know that we ever really came to a satisfactory solution about how to fix that particular problem,” Janofsky said. “These programs do run successfully in other parts of the country … but that liability issue turned out to be a big one for us.”
A district spokesperson said in an email Thursday that the walking school bus program was paused “for various reasons, including a lack of capacity from CCSD staff members.”
The program will return in the 2026-27 school year under a new model, the spokesperson added. Community partners will be allowed to operate walking school buses at individual schools with the district’s cooperation.
Ideas without funding
While the report identifies dozens of ways to improve student pedestrian safety, it notes that securing funding for the recommendations is up to local agencies and jurisdictions.
Bennett noted that there are ways to save money on larger recommendations. Incorporating school zone safety ideas into existing infrastructure improvement projects, for example, could lessen costs, he said.
The report also does not outline a process for checking in on the progress of the various recommendations. Bennett said he will report to the Clark County Commission 30 days after the start of school to discuss progress on implementing the working group’s recommendations.
The school district will complete or commence all of the report’s immediate recommendations by Aug. 10 because they all build on current district work and programs, according to a district spokesperson. Longer-term ideas, however, may require additional funding and resources, they added.
“CCSD leadership will work internally and externally to determine what investments we can undertake,” the spokesperson said in an email.
The district will also strengthen its traffic safety education efforts in the 2026-27 school year through expanded traffic safety lessons and a new program that lets high schoolers develop and implement peer-led safety initiatives, the spokesperson added.
Jeff Clark, the newly named chief of school district police, previously said he supported the report’s recommendations to increase school traffic enforcement, conduct an intensive back-to-school traffic campaign and enhance coordination with other law enforcement agencies.
A district spokesperson said that school police are working with other law enforcement agencies to develop plans for greater traffic enforcement in school zones at no cost to the district’s budget.
Individual charter schools are responsible for implementing the report’s recommendations, according to Melissa Mackedon, executive director of the Nevada State Public Charter School Authority.
After Bennett presented the report to the Commission, Chair Michael Naft stressed the importance of accountability in ensuring the recommendations become reality.
“Come back and show me how many crosswalks we’ve painted during summertime, how many signs have we fixed or replaced, what schools we’ve audited,” Naft said during the Tuesday meeting. “All of that data should be available, and we have to hold people accountable to bring it back to us.”
Contact Spencer Levering at slevering@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0253.
