Every morning before school, streets around Denver’s Hill Middle School are aswarm with minivans, SUVs, bicycles, pedestrians and school buses.
“I have an army of adults out there directing traffic and trying to keep everyone from running into each other,” said principal Don Roy.
The same type of chaos plays out at most schools today in an era in which less than 15 percent of U.S. children walk or ride their bikes to school.
Most students today get chauffeured by parents — a trend that a worldwide campaign hopes to reduce.
This morning is International Walk to School Day, an event intended to promote benefits of walking and bicycling to school.
About 200 Colorado schools have signed up to host walk events at their schools, including Superior Elementary School in Boulder Valley, Swansea Elementary in Denver and Kemp Elementary in Commerce City.
“We’re in the midst of a revolution around foot power,” said Landon Hilliard, student transportation coordinator with Boulder Valley School District. “It seems to me that more people are cluing on the health benefits. There is some social momentum going on. You see more bike trains and walking school buses.”
In a quiet Littleton neighborhood, parents gather kids from the cul de sac every morning and begin their trek to nearby Blue Heron Elementary.
“We have a rotating pool of parents,” said Jacquie Garrelts, who on Tuesdays chaperones about eight students from her block to school. “The kids get a little exercise as part of their daily routine, and you just get this sense of a neighborhood.”
In the 1960s, roughly half of students walked or biked to school every day, according to the National Safe Routes to School Task Force.
But the numbers of walking students have been falling over the years as public education changes.
Driving kids to school is becoming a necessity as school districts have gone to open enrollment and students now have more charter and magnet school options instead of attending neighborhood schools.
“That’s one of our bugaboos,” said Hilliard of Boulder, where 35 percent of the students choose schools outside their neighborhood. “We are encouraging carpooling and riding the RTD.”
School consolidation also has closed neighborhood schools, and many times new schools are built on edges of communities.
Suburban neighborhoods also have been designed without pedestrians in mind, said Lenore Bates, Colorado’s interim Safe Routes to School program manager.
“We went from a grid system to lollipop designs where you have to walk to the big collector streets where cars are going 40 miles per hour,” Bates said. “Would you let your 6-year-old walk on that street?”
Today, as much as 21 percent of morning rush traffic is generated by parents driving kids to school, according to the task force.
The federally funded National Center for Safe Routes to School is pushing communities to encourage more walking and biking, providing knowledge and technical information to implement safe and successful routes.
“We’re making communities aware of necessary improvements that are needed, like connections in paths and crossing guards,” Bates said. “It lets the community identify what they are lacking, so they can take that information and get funding.”
In August 2005, federal legislation established the National Safe Routes to School Program and provided $612 million toward Safe Routes to School from 2005 to 2010.
Jeremy P. Meyer: 303-954-1367 or jpmeyer@denverpost.com