The issue of safe routes to school surfaced again last week when we reported on Middle Canyon Elementary students who were walking to school on busy Droubay Road because the sidewalk on their route was covered in snow and ice. This sidewalk lies on the back side of a row of double-frontage lots, meaning it is often neglected by the property owners who bear the responsibility of keeping it clear. Tooele City says it is difficult to enforce the clean-sidewalks ordinance against property owners.

This is an issue that keeps coming back to haunt us in multiple forms. At East Elementary, students are forced to choose between a steep hillside with no sidewalk on Seventh Street or crossing the street at a dangerously blind point in the road. At Willow Elementary in Grantsville, another school without approaching sidewalks, students must trudge through snow or down the busy road leading to the school. At Northlake, heavy pick-up and drop-off traffic, combined with a lack of sidewalks for children heading west, means walking kids often end up weaving in and out of idling vehicles as school gets out.

Certainly, parents and the school district can contribute to a solution to the problem of kids being able to walk to school safely by working together on routes and safety techniques. But the lion's share of responsibility for solving the problem should go to Tooele and Grantsville cities. They must ensure that infrastructure like sidewalks, signs, lights and road markings are in place to keep kids safe. They must also find a way to keep sidewalks clear so that kids aren't forced to walk in busy roads. One component of that is making sure that it isn't city snowplows that are pushing snow from the streets up on to the sidewalks in the first place.

Ensuring safe routes to school during the winter might mean the city will have to enforce a subjective sidewalk-clearing ordinance for the greater good. Or it might mean rewriting the ordinance so that it's more easily enforceable. Or, at the point at which the city has thrown up its hands because it can't enforce the ordinance, perhaps it would be simpler to roll up its sleeves and run a ATV plow down those dangerous stretches of sidewalk where kids have no other route options.

We can't think of a more important contribution city government can make to its citizens than helping our children get to school safely.