Getting kids moving

Safe Routes to School aims to create safe, convenient and fun opportunities for children to bicycle and walk to and from schools. The goal is to reverse the decline in children walking and bicycling to schools, increase kids’ safety and reverse the alarming nationwide trend toward childhood obesity and inactivity.

At the local level, Safe Routes to School practitioners run education and encouragement programs with families and schools and push for strong municipal and district policies to support safe walking and bicycling.

In 2005 Congress approved funding for implementation of Safe Routes to School programs in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Paxton Roberts of BikeNWA.

“We want to both encourage and make it safer for kids to walk and bike to school,” Roberts said. “And, if we do that, it also makes the community at large safer for them to walk around their neighborhoods and go to parks and get to destinations because if you draw even a 1-mile circle around every school, it covers a large footprint.”

The authority will be the applicant through the state Transportation Department, and, if successful, BikeNWA will run the program. Neither the regional planning commission nor BikeNWA could apply under the grant guidelines, but the authority could.

The two-year plan would see BikeNWA hire a regional coordinator and create a task force to implement plans, write specific travel plans for individual schools, train instructors and identify larger pools of money that could be used for Safe Routes projects.

Roberts said the first year the organization would work with schools in Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers and Bentonville. The second year, they would focus on smaller schools. Roberts said many schools want to participate in Safe Routes programs but often don’t have the people to do it.

“We don’t want to force anything on anybody,” Roberts said. “If we get started at one school, community support will help it spread.”

Planners said they expect to know by fall whether they’ll get the grant and the program could start in January.