Schooled: Safe School Buses, What About Sidewalks?

This week one of our local State Delegates saw a piece of their legislation signed that closed a loophole on bus safety.

A bill proposed by Richard Anderson (Va–51, Lake Ridge, Prince William) requires drivers to stop for school buses loading and unloading children, and specifies a charge of reckless driving for those who fail to do so.  Honestly, my Driver’s Ed instructor must have lied to me because I didn’t realize those flashing stop signs were optional. 

Either way, though, I’m always happy to see children’s safety being ensured.

However, it made me think about those of us fortunate enough to hoof it to school. Prince William and Stafford County Public Schools provide bus transportation for students who reside more than one mile from their school, and with the number of elementary schools in my portion of the Potomac Communities, there are a significant number of us walking or driving our children to school. 

While I’m not an adherent of the Lenore Skenazy approach to parenting, I’m also not opposed to children walking a reasonable distance to school.  In fact, in recent years everyone from the National Parent Teacher Association to the Centers for Disease Control have been touting walking to school as a way to combat everything from lack of attention in classrooms to childhood obesity. 

Students in other nations, such as Japan, begin their day with exercise and I’ve noticed in my own children that a little “morning air” helps their focus and energy levels all day.

I feel like there’s a little more to be said, though.  Yes, walking is healthy, and yes, children can handle it.  However, when we walk to our local elementary school we have two options: a partial sidewalk behind a section of trees that renders the walker invisible to street view, or, walking on a busy four-lane portion of road with no sidewalk. 

When it snows the sidewalks are never shoveled by the time school re-opens and there is at least one child in the afternoon walking in the road. Having spent two years in Massachusetts, I feel like I can gently tell you that we Virginians are not meant to drive in even the smallest amount of residual slush, especially with children in the road.

We also live near enough to the local middle school that every afternoon there is a crowd of relatively dedicated pre-teens who walk up a narrow unpaved strip to pick up their younger siblings.  I’m fairly certain that our high schoolers who walk the same section of road are passive aggressive toward those of us with licenses and actively choose to try to make us slow down by walking in the street, but it’s just a guess.

If we’re going to ask our children to walk to school, don’t they deserve at least the benefit of accessible, and visible, sidewalks? While our communities have been relatively lucky, the National Conference of State Legislatures reports that hundreds of children are killed each year walking to school.

The Virginia Department of Transportation currently holds the funds allocated to Virginia from the Safe Routes to School campaign, but parents or school officials must apply to the program and detail their own plan for fixing the problems in their immediate vicinity. 

Now that we’ve made the children riding on buses even safer, perhaps our legislators can focus on a more comprehensive plan to keep the children walking to school safe, too.