Posted on 09/14/2009 7:40:44 AM PDT by Arec Barrwin
September 13, 2009 Why Can’t She Walk to School? By JAN HOFFMAN
TO get to school, the child leaves home by herself, proudly walking down the boulevard in a suburb of a small city in upstate New York. The crossing guard helps her at the intersection. She lives only a block and a half from school. Yet she walks by older children waiting with parents for buses to the same school.
She is 7, a second-grader, and her mother, Katie, hears the raised-eyebrow remarks: ‘Are you sure you want to be doing this?’ Katie said friends ask.
‘She’s just so pretty. She’s just so ... blond.’ A friend said, ‘I heard that Jaycee Dugard story and I thought of your daughter.’ And they say, ‘I’d never do that with my kid: I wouldn’t trust my kid with the street,’ said Katie, a stay-at-home mother, who asked that her full identity be withheld to protect her children.
Katie, too, is tormented by the abduction monsters embedded in modern parenting. Yet she wants to encourage her daughter’s independence. Somehow, walking to school has become a political act when it’s this uncommon, she said. Somebody has to be first.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I substitute for elementary school, and haven’t seen any fearful children.
Just because my children don’t walk to school doesn’t mean I go around constantly lecturing them about all the dangers in life.
Of course, my elementary and middle school children would have to travel and cross main traffic-ridden roads. My son does walk a half mile to high school.
I don't know about that. I'm of the opinion that there were just as many pervs back in the sixties and seventies (when I grew up) as there are now. The difference is that nowadays kids have been better educated about reporting it. It's kinda like all the female teachers being involved with their underage students. It was going on back then too, but when it happened, the teacher was quietly relocated to another school.
I.n.Y.o.u.r.D.r.e.a.m.s.
I also believe the fear is overblown. My daughter walked or rode a bike for several years until high school (too far to walk), mostly with a group.
It’s a start. And, FWIW I’m sure you’re a good parent.
You make an important point. Most suburbs built since the 60's are not pedestrian friendly, with isolated subdivions separated by miles of space, connected by winding rural roads. I know this describes the suburbs I grew up in in Maryland and Georgia. The town in Michigan in which my wife grew up was very different, with wide, straight boulevards, on a grid, with wide shoulders (for snow plowing, I guess), with schools located within residential areas. She would walk to school passing nothing but other houses along the way. In the suburbs, as opposed to older town and cities, very few people even live close enough to the school to raise the question of walking.
I think simple pedestrian safety/distance has as much to do with it as fear of "the other."
In my wife's hometown, I would be much more comfortable letting my kids walk to school. Where I am now, in N GA, where the road to the new local elementary school is an old indian trail, winding, hilly, with no shoulder (in fact pretty deep ravines on each side in some spots), no kids walk there.
Actually, that is a main reason I wouldn't let her walk to school. The other being school is about 3 miles away. Even with sidewalks, I think that is a bit too far to walk.
This is probably true of thousands of subdivisions across the country. They get built just off main roads, and they put a school in between them to serve all the subdivisions -- tada, big roads kids have to cross to get to school. This problem is compounded in my town where pedestrian considerations are the worst I've ever seen, both from the city's point of view (not many crosswalks in town) and the drivers who ignore the few crosswalks that exist.
Did you know that in Germany you can pretty much forget driving ever again if you hit a kid on a crosswalk? And that's not even one with a red light, just the zebra stripes across the road. There was a hit and run on one where a girl died and it was national news, with a national manhunt.
Plus we could stop, pick berries, cherries, oranges, avocados, get pies from Mrs so and so, chickens and worked sometimes helping farmer John irrigate or prune, or clean out the barn for free stable fees....life in school was a trade and hard work. We could care less about the walk. People who rode the buses were considered "wimps" and received no benefits of meeting and getting to know neighbors personal for miles around
True, it's more dangerous and that is absoloutely a sad tragedy. After walking or gettting home, I had brothers and sisters to care for, cook the meal or help one of my sisters, go to my job until 1700( 5:00pm unless there was extra work, went to clubs, went surfing for 3-4 hours than did homework and PARTIED on Friday only to work on the weekends....and this was only the 60's and part of the early 70's!
Do I have sympathy, empathy of care about the "wimps." No. As my peers in the military used to so faithfully remind me when some pooor sap complained about latrine duty or eating out of a c-rat( just new to MRE's at the time),"XIN LOI jerkwad...DEAL WITH IT!"
And don't get me started about the parents that would spoil the dickens out of their kids buying then new cars and their insurance....I understand they wanted the best for their children but I saw way to many accidents and irresponsible behavior...by the time these kids( not all) hit college, they's get divorced for their first love, develop a drug problem and just never understoood the concept of when some of us " poor mentally retarded bum punk a^^ kids that walked, networked and helped each other...it WASN'T community organizing...the community was organized around those that worked, the kids and teens that helped gramp and grandma Jones prime the pump and fix their tractor when they couldn't anymore, painted thier home, fixed the barn and stables, groomed their horses fed their stock, weeded and harvested the gardens, cleaned their homes and fixed their meals they way we remembered them one day years ago from cleaning our diapers, and teaching us valuable lessons throught life.
We held their hands until death NEVER thinking we'd get a penny...it was just something we were taught and learned. We were friends, neighbors and we knew, you give, you get. thus endeth my lecture on the days when life was just life. It was hard, but it was harder before and we had it real easy comparatively than most.
God bless ya'll and God please do not forget all the good people that still love, pray, selflessly care for each other and always put God, Family and country first.
Just an addendum to my lengthly,”book.” Now days....we’d have to find a ride for our daughter. The areas she’d have to walk through were dangerous. We had to work in the city and the amount of crimes does NOT it any MSM statistics nor any newspapers. The amount of violence, stealing, rapes, abductions and petty crime, more drugs is terrrible. gads, i wish I had the money then to find a rural area to live and work like when I grew up...wish I had the $$ now but ...eh, life has changed for children and sadly I think this stresses parents and the child horribly. Soon there will be srious breaking points....I hope I’m wrong but Jesus said so, so I believe it( Mt Ch 24).
I believe that in most states students have to meet one of two criteria for school bus transport. One is distance, but the other is a walkable route defined as safe, with a definition including things like presence of sidewalks for the entire route, and obviously, legal places for pedestrians to cross streets. If you live 100 yards from school and your home is on one side of an interstate highway and your school is on the other side, distance isn’t really relevant.
Except that a few days later you saw your dad cleaning his shotgun, and you knew he hadn't gone hunting or to the range recently.
Parents like to keep the nasty details from the kids. :)
dfwgator, I’m in Carrollton. Where are you?
I can top thqat - I have student whose house BORDERS the property line of the school. Yes, a bus stops to pick him up
You win.
A liability conscious world is a less free world.
Kill the lawyers.
Sounds like a mom in a relationship with a drug dealer or some other creep. One major way to save children’s lives would be for their mothers to stop hooking up with scum.
Well, that is too far, and I would be very nervous without sidewalks, of course, depending on the traffic etc. I think parents have to do what they’re comfortable with, but I don’t think someone is a bad parent because they do let them walk, and I see positive things from it.
Your tagline is hysterical!
Actually, they think it was a random abduction for $$. They had another woman abducted and forced to withdraw money from her ATM at the same mall. I haven’t heard anything recent about the case tho.
http://www.wptv.com/content/news/topstories/story/Boca-Raton-mall-murder-task-force-disbanded/ERzOb1w-JUW3GZyO7J__Ww.cspx
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