When Children Walked to School
We need to rebuild the culture we once had where it was safe for children walk to school and be at school.
When I was a boy, my brothers and I walked more than 2 miles every weekday. This was because we lived a little bit more than a mile from the school we attended.
Our home was in the Dominican neighborhood of San Rafael, California, which was named for Dominican College, the then-all-girls Catholic college that was located there. Our school was at St. Raphael Parish, the home of Mission San Rafael, which was founded by Spanish Franciscan missionaries in 1817.
Our route took us through a pleasant residential neighborhood of single-family homes and then into the business center of the town.
Directly across the street from our school and church stood the old Marin County Courthouse, which was built in 1873 that would have looked at home sitting on the mall in Washington, D.C.
On the other side of the courthouse was Fourth Street, which was San Rafael’s main street. It was lined with small family-owned businesses and served in 1972 as one of the filming locations for George Lucas’ cruising movie, “American Graffiti.”
As we walked home from school each day, my brothers and I walked past some interesting places. At the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Fifth Street, for example, stood a brown-shingle house that the Grateful Dead used as their office space starting in 1970, when I was still in grammar school.
A block and a half down Lincoln from the Dead’s office was a delicatessen owned by one of the families in our parish. They made great sandwiches, using locally baked sourdough bread.
Immediately next door to the Dead’s office on Fifth Street was a family-owned grocery store run by the grandfather of one of my classmates.
When we had a nickel to spare, my brothers and I would stop there on the way home from school to buy a pack of baseball cards. One of my younger brothers and I had an annual competition with each other to see who would be the first to collect all of the cards for that year’s San Francisco Giants team.
Our experiences walking to and from school were similar to those of most of our classmates. Their parents did not drive them to school or put them on a bus. They let them walk.
That was not unusual in America in the 1960s and early ‘70s. But it is today.
An article published in 2011 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine noted that 47.7% of students in kindergarten through eighth grade walked or biked to school in 1969. By 2009, that had dropped to just 12.7% of students.
A survey published in this same journal in 2019 reported that 16.5% of parents said “their youngest child walks to or from school at least once during a usual week.”
Why has there been such a steep decline since the 1960s in the percentage of children walking to school?
“The most common barrier,” said the Preventive Medicine article about the survey, “was living too far away (51.3%), followed by traffic-related danger (46.2%), weather (16.6%), 'other’ barrier (14.7%), crime (11.3%), and school policy (4.7%).”
The data from this survey showed that among students who lived less than a quarter mile from school in 2017, there were still 47.4% who walked to or from school. But among those who lived between a quarter and a half mile away, only 37.9% walked. Among those who lived between a half mile and a full mile, only 30.8% walked; and among those who lived between 1 mile and 2 miles, it was only 12.5%.
At the end of August, Americans saw a profoundly evil mass shooting take place at a Catholic parish in Minneapolis. A 23-year-old male, who “identified as female,” shot up Annunciation Catholic Church while students from the parish school were attending Mass there. This murderer killed an 8-year-old child and a 10-year-old child and injured 18 other children and three adults before taking his own life.
In the wake of this shooting, as reported by Catholic World Report, “Catholic schools around the country have been evaluating their security measures, with some hiring security guards and others allowing teachers and staff to be armed.”
This is the right thing to do.
But this country needs to do more than just step up the security on our streets and in our schools to make certain that our citizens — and especially our children — are safe there. We need to rebuild the culture we once had where it was safe for children walk to school and be at school.
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