Busing versus walking to school — which is better?
Indeed, over a century ago, Alexander MacKay, a superintendent of education in Nova Scotia, called on the children in 1,400 schools to carry out some citizen science on their walks to and from school. They were asked, for example, to watch for the first plants blooming in the spring. A CBC story earlier this year focused on McKay’s data collection because it has meaning today.
Modern researchers, looking at climate change, are impressed that back in the 1890s he asked for reports on things like animal migrations and thunderstorms. They told their teachers, who sent the data to MacKay. He published the results in a Dalhousie University scientific journal every year for 23 years.
When this region had passenger train service, it often functioned as school transportation. High school students took the train from Kingsport into Kentville or from Clarksville into Windsor in order to graduate.
Today we walk a fine line around school transportation knowing that school age children spend an average of three hours per day on screens, according to Statistics Canada, and only two out of five get the recommended hour of daily physical activity.
Two-thirds of all Nova Scotians are not active enough to achieve health benefits. Active transportation is important. I was interested to read that in Finland, school kids bike to school in weather conditions as cold as we see in Canada. In the city of Oulu, which is in the north, as many as a thousand out of 1,200 students walk or bike to school.
Are we too protective? The Walking School Bus program in Nova Scotia goes back over 15 years, but as one grandmother in Berwick told me, “kids have to be bubble-wrapped today. Their parents all drive them and that causes a regular traffic jam outside the school.”
Kristen Loyst at the Annapolis Valley Centre for Education says Wolfville was the only town added to the bussing schedule this year and then only the kids living over a kilometre from school.
“They don’t have to take the bus,” she added. But isn’t it nice when the slush is pooling on the sidewalks that they have the choice.