Walking Your Child To School.

Remember the days of the neighborhood school?  Remember when all the kids in the neighborhood walked together to school in groups and picked up a new child as they passed neighborhood homes? I wonder how old you have to be to remember this?  I remember my children going off to school at age 5 and walking a mile, alone and unattended, to our neighborhood school.  Our society was different then and we never feared for our child's safety while going to and from school. A changing society, suburban sprawl and unsafe city streets have necessitated school busing programs.  

In my first teaching assignment, the students not only walked to school, but went home for lunch!!  Gone are the good old days.  Now Johnny and Sally get picked up by the school bus at their doorstep or the corner of their street. The school cafeteria provides their lunch (not always the healthiest) and recess is shorter in the name of more classroom time. Physical Education programs are often cut back when school budgets get tight, and all of this contributes to the childhood obesity crisis we are facing.

But never fear when creative parent's are near.  A group of parents who lived in a town that still had neighborhood schools, decided that they wanted their children to walk to school when they were too close for bussing, in preference to individually driving their child to school. Have you ever noticed the large number of cars entering and leaving the school entrances each morning? What a waste of fuel.  

These ingenious parents formed walking groups of parents who escorted groups of students from their neighborhood to the school.  They established walking routes and each assigned parent would walk their route and pick up all the children along the way.  Since there are more kids than parents, any individual parent only got the duty once every two weeks or less.  A bonus for the parents was that they also got some exercise which contributed to their total fitness level.  Stay at home Mom's or parents with flexible work schedules made the return walk after school.  

The down side of all this is that not all schools are within walking distance, and regional schools are situated too far away for students to walk.  However, maybe we should think "out of the box" and have the students dropped off one mile from their school, and have assigned teachers meet them there to walk the remaining distance.  We might even give the teachers that volunteer a small stipend as we do for many extra-curricular activities.  Just a thought, but with the scope of the obesity problem and the low fitness levels or our kids, and the lack of funds for daily physical education, any and all ideas are worth considering.