Gettings Kids to Bicycle to School

New bike racks at Hart Elementary School in Austin
(photo courtesy of the City of Austin)

Back in 1969 (what my kids now refer to as the “olden days”), walking and bicycling to school was part of everyday life. Nearly half of all students traveled to school on foot or by bike. Today, that’s no longer the case, with only 13% of children walking or bicycling to school. Meanwhile, the percentage of children arriving at school by private automobile has increased from 12% to 44% (the rate of school bus ridership has stayed almost the same).

Austin is home to a number of innovative programs to encourage kids to bicycle to school. Last month, the City of Austin launched a major bicycle/walk-to-school initiative at Hart Elementary School, which serves a high proportion of low-income students with limited opportunities to be active. Along with the installation of a 1.3-mile cycle track connecting nearby apartment complexes to the school, the City secured 300 bikes to donate to children who commit to cycling to school. As of this week, more than 80 kids were cycling to school regularly!

The Bike Train at Hart Elementary School in Austin
(photo courtesy of the City of Austin)

As part of the program, the City has set up bike trains and walking school buses with adult monitors to pick the students up from their apartment complexes and supervise their commute to school. (A bike train is an organized group of students who cycle together along a pre-arranged route to school under the close supervision of adults.  A walking school bus is the pedestrian version of a bike train.) When the students arrive on campus, they swipe a special card so their parents can know they arrived safely.

In addition to the City’s program at Hart Elementary, at least five other elementary schools in Austin low-income neighborhoods have recently started walking school bus programs. Meanwhile, parents and PTA organizations at a number of local schools have started their own bike trains. The City of Austin’s Child Safety program provides support to parents who want to set up their own bike trains, by providing maps for customized biking routes and reflective arm bands for participants.

Boltage program at Doss Elementary School
(photo courtesy of AISD)

Several area schools, including Doss Elementary and Martin Middle Schools, have adopted high-tech approaches to get kids on bikes. One of these programs, Boltage, uses a solar-powered reader that records each child’s bike trip to school. The records are then used to reward students who commute to school regularly by bike.

While Austin has made great progress recently in encouraging kids to cycle and bike to school, our community has a long ways to go if we want to reclaim the days when one out of every two kids bicycled or walked to school. By helping kids walk and bicycle to school, we can make a dent in child obesity rates here in Austin, where 38% of children in grades 3 to 8 are overweight or obese.  Increasing cycling and walk-to-school rates also reduces traffic congestion. In some communities, as much as 30% of vehicle traffic in the morning rush hour is from children being driven to school.

 

Safety remains the biggest barrier to getting more kids on bikes. We should all be advocating at City Hall for more local funding to create safer routes to schools, including sidewalks, cycle tracks, and neighborhood traffic calming. I love seeing what other cities are doing in this regards. Portland and Seattle, for example, are both building a network of neighborhood greenways that give priority to cyclists and pedestrians. By 2015, 80% of Portland residents will live within half a mile of a neighborhood greenway.

At a neighborhood and school level, setting up a bike train or walking school bus can go a long way in overcoming parents’ concerns about safety. In Portland, bike trains are now a predominant feature of kids’ commute to school, supported by a robust cycling culture and even a website with information on bike trains in operation around the city. In Seattle, the school district is working to set up a bike train or walking school bus at every elementary school in the district.

Austin is lucky to already have lots of success stories to build from to help our children bike and walk to school. Working together as a community to address the remaining barriers, I see no reason why we cannot reach the same goal that Seattle recently adopted—to get 50% of children walking and biking to school again.

(Look for a longer version of this blog post in the November issue of Austin Fit). 

The Link Between Strong Neighborhood Schools and Attracting Families to Cities

Today I received the following email from a friend:

"I know someone who is moving here this summer and looking for where to live. Has school age children and so being at a good school is important. Can you guys give advice on good areas of town to look?

Not surprisingly, for a family with school-age children moving to a new city, a good school equates to a good neighborhood. As a recent article in Atlantic Cities states: "When given the chance, parents want their children to attend a high-performing school ... that's close to home." This spring, the Dallas Morning News conducted a survey of the best neighborhoods in the Dallas region for families with children. The newspaper found that top-ranked neighborhoods had a high concentration of exemplary-rated schools. Having access to a high performing school in the neighborhood was families' highest priority in ranking a neighborhood after safety.

In Austin lately there has been a policy disconnect between providing good schools and providing good neighborhoods that attract families with children to the city. Last month, Austin voters rejected two out of four Austin Independent School District bond measures, which would have provided $400 million in funding for school facility upgrades and additions, including improvements to the district's arts and athletic facilities. Many of these facility upgrades were the exact type of improvements needed to help attract families to the district.

The bond vote came after our local daily paper went on a rampage against the bonds. One hang up of the Statesman was that the bond package proposed new schools while several of the district's schools remain under-enrolled. The issue of AISD's under-enrolled schools first received heightened attention in 2011 after an AISD task force made preliminary recommendations calling for the closure of nine schools. Following fierce public criticism, the proposal was rejected by the AISD board. There has been little public discussion since then about how to address the district's under-enrolled schools.

Instead of focusing on shutting down schools, the district and city should be working together to transform our under-enrolled schools into neighborhood assets that become a magnet for families with children, thus filling the open seats while also drawing families into the city. A focus on shutting down schools (which appears to still be the Austin Chamber's priority) is shortsighted and fails to consider the key role that strong neighborhood schools play in attracting families with children to a city. As city leaders like Iowa City's mayor know, "without strong investment in neighborhood schools, attracting families and reinvestment to the core of our community becomes difficult.” In a similar vein, the University of North Carolina's Urban Institute found that "a neighborhood that lacks good public school options – or even is just perceived as lacking them – can have trouble attracting the more educated, middle-income families who can bring stability and rising incomes to once-downtrodden areas." And a study for HUD found, "creating an excellent public elementary school can be a powerful marketing tool to attract families to the neighborhood or to persuade those already living in the neighborhood to stay."

I am sitting on a workgroup set up by the joint subcommittee of City of Austin, Travis County, and AISD that is now exploring these issues locally. I am intrigued by what other cities have done to tie together investments in neighborhood schools with attracting new families with children into their schools and neighborhoods. Some examples I have found so far both here and across the country:

• The Goldseker Foundation in Baltimore funded neighborhood-school partnership grants in that city, with the goal of creating desirable neighborhoods through high-quality schools, increasing enrollment and academic quality in the schools, and attracting families with children into the city.
• In St. Louis, Missouri, families migrated back into three neighborhoods to live within the attendance boundaries of a high performing Montessori-based charter school, leading city leaders to see good schools as an opportunity to reverse decades of population loss in the city.
• After Austin Independent School District placed a dual language program at Becker Elementary School in 2010, the school's enrollment increased from 55% to 71% capacity. 
• In Philadelphia, a new neighborhood-based public elementary school was created near the University of Pennsylvania through a partnership with the university, school district, and teacher's union. The creation of the school was part of a larger community development plan aimed at stabilizing the area and attracting new families to the neighborhood. The highly coveted school, which utilizes an innovative, technology-rich curriculum, now has a waiting list.