Walking Towards Safety | Video

Amy Fox | 9/25/2012

It looks like a quiet street now, but at 3:00 in the afternoon, it`s a different story.

"Dismissal time at every school is really busy and they are always, it seems like, motorists who are a little less considerate than others, so that`s always an issue," said Bel Air Elementary School Principal Mike Fogarty.

When we send our children off to school for the day, many of them will rely on crosswalks to get to and from school safely. But, during school hours, are drivers really stopping at crosswalks? Or, are they just driving through these intersections putting our children’s lives?

Well, we wanted to find out, so we checked out Bel Air Elementary School during the after-school rush.

I hid out behind a fence waiting for the last bell of the day to ring.

As the kids began to leave the school, many of the parents acted as crossing guards, walking with their children across the street.

Once the children reached the crosswalk, drivers began to slow down, allowing the anxious school kids to cross the street.

"Kids can pop out of nowhere,” said mother Jacqueline Zimmerman. “Balls come out and you better expect the kid to follow behind it regardless of where you are."

While we weren`t able to catch any violators today, the startling fact in our experiment was many of the kids didn’t take the time to look both ways before crossing the busy street.

Zimmerman said, "We enforce our kids to look both ways before they cross the street, but kids sometimes just don`t listen."

While this was only a test, we can only hope with more education, both our children and parents will know what to do when they approach a crosswalk not only during school hours, but at anytime.

School officials say parents need to do a better job of warning their kids not to run out in the middle of traffic.

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