A project developed and designed by Tablelands Area Road Safety Officer Iris Dorsett has recently collected an award for being a Finalist in the Australasian College of Road Safety 3M - ACRS Diamond Road Safety Awards.
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The award was presented by the Australasian College of Road Safety (ACRS) Patron, the Governor-General of Australia, His Excellency Sir Peter Cosgrove, at a ceremony attended by more than 250 of Australasia's foremost road safety professionals and advocates on November 13, at the Grand Hyatt, Melbourne.
The Kindy Kits project in its original format was a road safety education program designed specifically for Kindergarten children in the Bathurst region. The program was designed in 2006 with the intention to fill a pressing need to educate very young children across the Bathurst community around road and bicycle safety matters.
In 2009 the program widened to encompass an environmental/recycling component, the reason for this was in acknowledging the early success of the program it was understood that Kindy Kits was a very good way of engaging with Kindergarten children across the region and it was believed than an environmental message could be added to the existing road safety messages without confusing the audience or diluting the importance of the original road safety messages.
Kindy Kits is an excellent example of a community road safety project gaining strong support and working well.
This project displays how to engage and deliver important road safety messages face to face to our one of the youngest road user groups to encourage and assist them to adopt life-long positive road safety behaviours.
During its eight years of successful implementation, Kindy Kits has proven how to establish and consolidate ongoing relationships with school communities, work collaboratively with other internal departments of Council, work collaboratively with community organisations - all this while promoting and delivering the important messages of road safety and caring for the environment to every kindergarten student and their families in the Bathurst Regional Local Government Area.
In March 2014, while planning for the 2014/17 Local Government Road Safety Program, Blayney Shire Council committed to the delivery of this project in the Blayney Shire commencing 2015.
Blayney Shire Mayor Cr Scott Ferguson congratulated Ms Dorsett on the "wonderful award".
"We're very excited for her and congratulate her on the award," he said.
"Iris has been a tremendous advocate for road safety for many years now. She's an asset to the Shire."