Walktober Challenge

Woodend’s recent Walktober Challenge was a great success! We nearly double the active travel trips from 2018 and we increased the number of students participating from 17 classrooms up to 24! Congratulations to Room 25 for winning the class participation challenge – for the second year in a row – with over 400 active travel trips in 11 days! The Blue Team won the house challenge this year with the Red & Yellow teams tied for a very close second place. Thank you to all families participating in the Walktober Challenge this year – we’ve seen so many children and families carry on walking or riding even though the challenge is over, which is exactly what we hope will happen.

NEW Shared Pathway

You may have seen that the NEW Shared Pathway & Oval Access (from Franklin Court to Berrima Rd) are now complete! This is a very exciting initiative for our community, helping us to make walking and riding to school safer and easier. We’ve already had so many Woodend students and families using this path – it is great to see how busy it is before and after school!

If you haven’t yet, do take a look at the pathway. There are many opportunities for parking near the path – you may not be able to easily walk or ride from your home but perhaps you could find spot to park near the path and walk/ride part of the way to or from school.

We would like to thank Marion Council staff – in particular Mathew Allen and Mark Griffin; our local Ward Councillors Maggie Duncan and Matthew Shilling; DPTI Way2Go staff – Matthew Mayes and Philippa Lee; Woodend Governing Council and Traffic Safety Committee; and Minister David Speirs for your work on this initiative.

2020 plans

Over the past 2 years, our Traffic Safety Committee have been working with Marion Council, Way2Go, and our school community on a number of initiatives to improve the traffic and safety around our school: extending the Kiss & Go, monitoring and adjusting street parking, creating the shared path and oval access, starting the Walktober Challenge and Bike Ed Program.

However, our work is not yet done! We need passionate parents to help continue the work of promoting active travel as well as improving parking/pick up zone issues. Please consider joining the Traffic & Safety Committee in 2020 – bringing your ideas, your voice, and your help to the table – so that we can continue building on what we’ve started.