When house hunting last year, we narrowed down our options for locations based on the following criteria, in order of importance:
1. Price
2. Crime rate
3. School district
4. Distance to work
The rest was more or less details. We ended up in a house well within our price range, less than a half mile from a firehouse, 2 doors over from a fire chief, across the street from 2 police officers, a half mile from our boys' elementary school, a quarter mile from the library, and 10 minutes from my husband's work.
We are living a dream.
We knew our sons would walk or ride to school. We also knew that it would be a struggle because the roads leading into the school no longer carry country life traffic, and this area seems especially irreverent when it comes to school zone traffic laws.
Our son is one of 4 children I have seen walking to school. It is not a small elementary school, friends. Probably at least 350 students or more, and the attendance area is all in very close proximity to the school. Our kindergartener's bike with training wheels is the only one I've seen in the bike rack since school began 2 weeks ago.
I have made numerous remarkss on facebook about the lack of attention paid by drivers, the number of people speeding. We had an accident happen within 100 feet of our children and myself and the driver claimed he rear ended the car in front of him because he was watching my kids to make sure they didn't run into the road.
they were not even moving and certainly it would have been more diligent to slow down and keep an eye on all of your surroundings than to keep your speed and watch children 10 feet off the side of the road, but I digress.
Many cars have made the right turn, directly in front of us, after the crossing guard had walked into the intersection and raised her sign and whistled. I have engaged in ominously assertive yelling at that intersection.
I think the question most people must be asking at this point is "why are you still walking if it's that dangerous? We wouldn't walk. Obviously, lady, there is a reason so few families are walking or biking to school"
Well, for starters I'm just stubborn.
I believe this is important. I believe what we are doing each morning is vital to his overall wellbeing, his development, and his success in school and the future.
There is now a daily recommended amount of exercise for children. You may better know it by the name Play60. We have had to tell parents "your kids really should be playing, actively, for 60 minutes a day".
Recess was not 60 minutes long at my school. Even recess plus PE was not daily 60 minutes worth of hard play.
You cannot just blame schools.
But, school was not so rigorous when I was a child. I wasn't put through a 7 hour kindergarten day, with once weekly PE and 20 minute recess, and I did not go home and veg in front of electronics.
There are strong correlations between physical activity and children's ability to learn. Proprioceptive stimulation (anything that essentially sends them flying think cartwheels, swings, flips, balancing on a bike, etc) is an effective tool for raising endorphins and tiring the body out.
People go on runs to clear their minds. Imagine the effect it would have on a child to flip and jump and run and bike, wake their minds up and settle their bodies, and then sit down to work? Those bodies are tired enough to sit and their minds are alert.
Cross body coordination movements (crawling, climbing, throwing a ball, hopscotch, most of the blacktop games we played as children) are suspected to have dramatic, invaluable effects on literacy and language processing.
Social interaction through play is how children learn conflict resolution. (note: i will admit this article is less specifically supportive of the assertion that play is vital for conflict resolution. but broad conflict resolution skills require encounters with a broad variety of conflicts and confrontations. what better place for that than among peers? how often in life do any of us go long periods without dealing with excessive noise, movement, or people? a playground seems like a great place to me to cultivate problem solving skills)
The simple act of biking to school teaches my son about directions, rules of the road, awareness of surroundings, and a sense of responsibility and pride.
My 5 year old boy is expected to be in a classroom, learning the things I learned in first grade, for 7 hours a day. Of that time I would wager at least 5 hours are devoted strictly to learning and I would also venture to say that his teacher doesn't expect all 5 hours to be silent or still.
I also am not sure if I am entirely against pushing children to these higher intellectual limits as a general society, but that is another post.
Even with those concessions, it is still a lot.
We are expecting superior mental stimulation and performance at the expense of physical stimulation and performance.
I don't believe all children should be great in all areas, but I do believe that ignoring one entire part of our being, or suppressing it in favor of another part of ourselves, is a detrimental stance. I believe public school is vital for society, and I do not for one moment believe it is the job of the school to provide for every need that my child has. We are a team. They are pouring knowledge in to him, I am helping direct the flow through the specific course of my own child's mind. Their task is large and difficult.
It is not difficult for me to help my child move. Movement is inherent, ubiquitous.
So we will walk, and we will bike and we will run. And we will teach him to jump and leap and somersault and swim. We will activate his mind and his body.
The cars are going to learn to stop for us. Children are our most valuable treasure. I will shout, I will slam car hoods, I will go to the school board, the police station, the city hall, I will go to reasonable, but loud measures to remind people how to drive around children. I will not give in to fear, laziness, poor planning, arrogance, or mindlessness. I will teach my boys to be cautious. I will walk with them every day and be their extra eyes and ears and safety. We will walk in the heat, in the rain (within reason and with extra clothes in tow!), in the cold and on the beautiful days.
Most of the days are beautiful.
The media will tell you that my child will be hit by a car or abducted. The statistics from our law enforcement would tell you that the odds of him actually getting hurt from a car are minimal, and the chances he'd be abducted are lower than the chances he will break his arm on his bike. I'm certainly not going to stop him from riding his bike on the off chance he MIGHT fall and break his arm, and I will not stop walking him to school because the screens tell me that every car is waiting to fly off the road and hit him or steal him.
We will walk, we will smile at our community, we will invite them along, and I will fight to make it safer.
But we will not stop.
"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."
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