Teacher hopes event encourages more students to walk to school

TUSCALOOSA|

Verner Elementary School Principal Beth Curtis smiled and laughed as groups of two or three and sometimes as many as 15 students made their way to the school, some having walked a quarter mile and some a mile or more.

“Isn’t this great?” she asked a visitor. “I wish we could do this every day.”

If Curtis has her way, more students will.

Verner Elementary took part Thursday in International Walk to School Day. Curtis estimated as many as 150 of the school’s 575 students participated. She said fewer than 10 students regularly walk to school.

Parents formed “walking school buses,” groups of children escorted by adults. Some walked all the way from their homes; others met their escorts at predetermined locations.

Curtis said she wants to convince parents that walking to school has plenty of benefits, not least of which are savings on the cost of gas and children getting more exercise.

But that can be a tall order in a society that has become increasingly dependent on automobiles.

“We’re so used to hopping in a car and being taken to where we want to go,” she said.

Curtis conceded that many of the concerns parents have about letting children walk to school are valid. Verner Elementary is on a busy road and sits next to Northridge High School, which has dozens of inexperienced teenage drivers.

Curtis said her school is applying for a grant to pay for safety measures, including the construction of sidewalks with barriers that would protect walkers from traffic.

“The main thing we want is to make walking safe,” Curtis said.

Mark Lent escorted his daughter Tanner and son Parker more than a mile from their neighborhood to the school.

“They just had a ball,” Lent said. “They got to stop and look at stuff, like millipedes and centipedes.”

Lent, 43, said his children don’t normally walk to school because of time constraints, but he would like to see them start walking at least once a week. He walked to school when he was a child but things have changed since, he said.

“It was a lot different time then,” Lent said. “You didn’t have to worry about getting your kids snatched.”

Overcoming safety concerns is one of the main obstacles to getting parents to allow their children to walk to school, said Jeffery Walker, a first-grade teacher at Verner Elementary.

Walker escorted about a dozen students Thursday during their one-mile-plus walk to school.

“I think parents will be open to the idea if we can assume that there will be crossing guards and someone to monitor the traffic,” he said.

Amanda Espy-Brown, a Verner Elementary parent and a University of Alabama instructor who has conducted traffic and walking pattern research, was one of the organizers of the school’s participation in International Walk to School Day.

Brown said it is not nearly as common for children to walk to school as it once was, citing statistics showing that half of all children walked to school in the 1960s, compared with less than 15 percent today.

She has been regularly walking with her two children, one of whom is now in middle school, for the past couple of years.

“It starts our day out right,” Brown said. “It’s almost the best time that I get to spend with my kids.”

She said there are benefits in children walking to school, aside from the exercise and savings in gas.

“It really can boost community cohesion and spirit,” she said.

Brown said parents should try walking their children to school at least once.

“If they try it once, we think they’ll get hooked,” she said.