Talking points offer helpful information on topics such as trends in school travel, safety, physical activity, environment and air quality, etc. These talking points may be helpful during interviews with local media, meetings with parents or any other communications planned for a Safe Routes to School program.
Chagrin Falls is a village of about 4,000 residents located 17 miles southeast of Cleveland. The village school system includes an elementary school (grades K-3), an intermediate school (grades 4-6, school population about 480), a middle school (grades 7-8, school population about 320), and a high school.
Milam Elementary in El Paso, Texas, has a unique method for keeping students safe and cycling. For the past six years, Milam (pronounced MY-lum) has given a bike license to each student in grades 3, 4 and 5 who passes a written and skills test after a two-week bicycle safety course. The license allows those students to ride their bikes to school on their own (that year OR for the duration of their time at the school).
As the importance of drawing upon community assets to sustain SRTS programs continues to grow, thinking beyond the "usual suspects" as partners is more important than ever. In this sixty minute program, we will highlight partner ideas from four outstanding programs that provide wonderful examples of building strong ties with other community organizations.
For most readers of this e-newsletter, Walk to School Day will be a happy memory at this point. Not so for Don Cross. He’ll have some warm and fuzzies for sure, but with more still to come for another week or so.
Six years ago, Community Connections, a local nonprofit that runs afterschool programs in Montpelier, Vt., public schools, identified a need to get students more physically active during the school day. The organization saw the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) program as the perfect way to get students excited about physical activity.
After receiving a non-infrastructure SRTS grant from the state, Community Connections spent the next two years running programs that concentrated on the five E’s: Education, Encouragement, Enforcement, Evaluation and Engineering.
Sometimes, one day can turn into something much bigger.
In Kauai, Hawaii, a Walk to School Day event at Kapa’a Elementary School boosted community support for a full-fledged Safe Routes to School program. The community was concerned about traffic as well as childhood and adolescent obesity. In 2009-2010, the school was selected to serve as a pilot school for a Safe Routes to School (SRTS) program.
The National Center for Safe Routes to School recently announced the selection of 25 recipients of $1,000 mini-grants for projects designed to encourage safe walking and bicycling to school. The mini-grant activities, many of which are driven by student leadership, will occur during the fall semester of the 2011-2012 school year.
