Fort Smith elementary student hit by vehicle recovers while school district prioritizes safety

FORT SMITH, Ark. (KNWA/KFTA) — The city of Fort Smith urges safety on Sept. 25 after a 10-year-old student had to be airlifted to the hospital when she was hit by an SUV.

Tuesday afternoon, tragedy struck Morrison Elementary when a student was hit by an SUV. Fort Smith public schools police say it can do a few things to enforce more safety.

Chief Eric Huber works for the Fort Smith Public Schools Police Department. As a department, it has been working on enforcing safety within the school district.

“We have been talking with our schools about school safety. Talking to the students crossing the roads is one of the things that we do. Also just ensuring that the traffic flows as smoothly as possible, ensuring that our drivers are not distracted when they are in the school zones as well,” said Huber.

He says they have a great working relationship with the Fort Smith Police Department because there are too many crosswalks to cover. “There’s a lot of our schools that have crossing guards and some that do not have crossing guards in certain areas. In Fort Smith, we have 27 different schools that we patrol, and so it becomes very hard for us to be at every crosswalk that there is because there’s going to be several crosswalk marks in the areas of each school,” said Huber.

Aric Mitchell works for the Fort Smith Police Department, and when it received the call Tuesday about a student being hit by a vehicle, they were quick to respond. “We were all very concerned. Made sure we made the proper arrangements for that child to get life-flighted to a hospital outside of our area for treatment then proceeded with the investigation which is still ongoing,” said Mitchell.

Mitchell says that this morning they received good news about the student’s condition. “We have gotten good news on that front. The child doesn’t appear to have any broken bones. Miraculously, no internal injuries, but they’re still under observation at this time. Our role in it was to do the actual accident investigation,” said Mitchell.

As for the Fort Smith Public Schools Police Department, they say they want every student to feel safe. That’s why they’re accepting volunteers to help with the crosswalks. “Anytime that we can have someone that can help assist students to cross the roads, that’s an adult we encourage that,” said Huber.

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