Poll: What Age Is Safe for Kids to Walk to School?

Wednesdays are special at Elk Grove’s . Students can earn prizes for taking part in what was once considered a very ordinary activity: walking to school.

Show up around 7:45 on a Wednesday morning and you’ll see student body leaders handing out poker-chip-like tokens to flocks of arriving walkers and bicyclists. The tokens are tallied and the class with the highest total wins a prize, usually popsicles.

It’s all part of a schoolwide campaign to promote the benefits of walking, from reducing childhood obesity to relieving congestion in the school parking lot.

“The kids love it,” said principal Paul Hauder. “They panic when they don’t get a token.”

Only a few decades ago, bribing children to commute by foot would probably have seemed odd to most parents. Today, however, only about 13 percent of elementary- and middle-school students nationwide regularly walk or bicycle to school, compared with almost half in 1969, according to the federal Safe Routes to School program.

The hopes to buck that trend with a $473,000 grant from the program. Awarded this month in a competitive process, the new funds will pay for a full-time staff person to travel the district encouraging walking and bicycling and informing parents and students about safety.

It may not be an easy sell.

“In this day and age, there is a general perception among parents that it is not safe to walk to school,” said Rob Pierce, an associate superintendent for the district. “A big part of this person’s job is going to be exploring that and what we can do about it.”

Scroll down to take our poll: At what age would you let your child walk to school?

Parents worry about everything from traffic accidents to strangers with bad intentions, Pierce said.

Recent incidents in which students were struck by cars near and Maeola Beitzel Elementary School have made some parents even more wary.

Still, district surveys from 2010 show Elk Grove Unified students outpacing the national average in making their own way to school. Principals reported that about 37 percent of elementary school students and 49 percent of middle-school students in the district were walking or biking to school at least one day a week.

“We feel this is due in part to the education and encouragement efforts at our schools over the past several years,” said district spokesperson Elizabeth Graswich.

District officials say they will use the four-year grant to experiment with programs like the Walking School Bus, in which adult volunteers visit designated locations throughout a neighborhood, “picking up” kids and walking them to school in a group.

They’ll also analyze blocks near schools to identify those with safety problems and make improvements.

Carroll’s weekly ‘Walk to School Day’ contest started three years ago. School employees say it has helped reduce traffic near the school, which serves nearly 1,200 students. And they hope to encourage more families to ditch their cars on other days, too.

“If they [parents] all just parked a block away and then walked the rest of the way, it would make a big difference with the traffic,” said crossing guard Arnold Harding as he waved pedestrians across an intersection Wednesday morning. “It takes them longer to get in and out of the parking lot than it would to walk in.”

Harding said he sees at least a few cars each year that roll right through the stop sign at the campus’s northwest corner. Sometimes, he said, drivers fail to notice when students stop in the middle of the street, realize they’ve forgotten something, and change direction. “It’s a little scary.”

The answer to those safety problems is more walking, not less, said district planning director Bill Heinicke.

“The more kids riding and walking to school, the less cars you have in front of schools,” he said. “That makes it safer in and of itself.”

Eric Wong takes his daughter Alissa, a second-grader, to school at Carroll every day. They drive halfway there, he said, then walk the rest of the way.

“We’re driving less so we save the carbon,” he said. “As long as I can walk with her, we both enjoy it.”

How old would she have to be for him to let her walk alone? He laughs nervously.

“I’m not sure.”