Baltimore schools CEO Andrés Alonso wants residents to shovel sidewalks in their neighborhoods to provide safe passage for students going to school next week.

"It is absolutely necessary for the community to help out in terms of sidewalks throughout the city," Alonso said.

"We have 83,000 kids, and they are not all going to be driven to school. You have 10-year-olds walking. Unless the sidewalks are done, we have a problem. It is not a problem that the city and the schools can solve. It is something that the community must do."

Alonso, who made the plea Friday at Calverton Elementary/Middle School, has spent the past week driving around the city looking at streets and sidewalks near the schools to assess the feasibility of asking teachers and students to venture back after what he called a "historic" and "monumental" storm.

Alonso hopes to have schools open Tuesday; students are off Monday for the Presidents Day holiday.

Employees will be working around the clock over the weekend and Monday to clear parking lots and sidewalks at the schools.

Alonso challenged the city to clear streets to ensure that school buses could pick up students Tuesday.

"We have 15,000 kids that travel on yellow buses," he said. "In the next three days, we need to have safe passage for the buses."

Alonso, who drives an SUV with four-wheel drive, said he hasn't had much of a problem getting from school to school, but realizes that many students and teachers do not have access to those types of vehicles.

"If you can't get the teachers to come in, you can't open schools," Alonso said. "If you can't get the kids to come in, you can't open schools."

Alonso, like most superintendents in the state, said he would not open schools on Monday to make up a snow day.

"Lots of people have made plans," he said. "We would need to get the word out. I don't think that we had enough time to open on Monday."

Discuss this story and others in our talk forums Most recent local news talk forum topics: More news talk forums: Local | Nation/World | Business | Health/Science | Computers/Technology Note: In-story commenting has been temporarily disabled due to technical issues. We are working to correct the issue and will bring back this feature in the future. In the meantime, please use our talk forums to discuss stories.