photo by: Courtesy of Stephanie Dickson

Students and parents at Sunset Hill Elementary in Lawrence participate in a walk or bike to school day.

Walking to school with your friends. Riding your bike home on a nice sunny day. These types of activities were a rite of passage for a lot of older adults who remember them fondly, even if they weren’t aware of any particular health benefit.

These days, there’s greater awareness of those benefits, even as the specific activities have dwindled. But health experts are looking to change that — by increasing kids’ movement and outdoor time before and after school.

Vicki Collie-Akers, an associate professor in the Department of Population Health at the University of Kansas Medical Center and a representative with Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health, said there are proven benefits for kids walking or riding bikes to and from school.

Collie-Akers works with the program Safe Routes to Schools, which started in 2014 and involves the health department, the school district, the City of Lawrence and the Lawrence-Douglas County Metropolitan Planning Organization. Now 10 years later, the school districts and cities of Eudora and Baldwin City have developed plans as well.

The Safe Routes program has worked to provide more options for parents and students to safely walk or bike to school. Its work has involved planning projects to improve sidewalks and to implement safety measures, as well as educating students on the importance of pedestrian safety.

Stephen Mason, a transportation planner with Metropolitan Planning, said he chuckles at the irony of his current role with the Safe Routes initiative.

Despite living half a mile from school growing up, Mason said he never walked or rode his bike. Now, a big focus of his work is improving the safety conditions for kids walking to school.

When Safe Routes started in 2014, Mason said the team got feedback from the community, including parents and teachers, about routes that students took to school. The team then scrutinized the safety of the routes and determined whether they could make improvements or lay out safer routes.

“There were a lot of opportunities for increased safety infrastructure,” Mason said.

Some of the traffic-controlling infrastructure the team used along the identified routes were High-Intensity Activated crosswalk, or HAWK, signals, which are pedestrian-activated signals that hang above roads that light up red for cars to stop, and Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacons, which are pedestrian-activated signals near crossing warning signs that rapidly flash yellow.

Mason also said the team pinpointed any sidewalk gaps — streets with no sidewalks or sidewalks only on one side. Since 2019, 11 sidewalk gaps were filled in, according to data shared by Metropolitan Planning, and Mason said that work is important for giving parents peace of mind.

“That lets parents feel more confident in letting their kids walk to school and also limits concerns of kids walking in streets or crossing multiple times,” Mason said.

Once the city reviewed the data, it released maps for each school that highlighted routes that were considered the safest.

Jessica Mortinger, a transportation planning manager, said the Safe Routes plan is updated every five years or after changes to school boundaries, which means that when two elementary schools closed in 2023, the team provided new routes.

Routes deemed official “safe routes” are incorporated into the city’s Regional Pedestrian Plan, which means those streets are prioritized to be worked on in the city’s non-motorized projects five-year plan, Mortinger said.

Stephanie Dickson knows that creating safe routes is one thing, but getting people to use them is another.

As a physical education teacher at Sunset Hill Elementary, part of Dickson’s responsibilities are to encourage walking and biking programs while also stressing safety to students.

Since Sunset Hill is near West Middle School and the schools release students at about the same time, there is always a lot of traffic that kids walking home — especially the littlest ones — could find tricky to navigate.

Along with “awesome” crossing guards who are hired by the city, Dickson said she gives a lot of lessons on the importance of using crosswalks and following signs and signals.

Once they’ve absorbed safe navigation skills, Dickson said, the kids get excited about walking or biking to other locations besides school, like to nearby Centennial Park or to the Merc Co-op. She shares her own experience with the students of how growing up, especially in a time without cellphones, she would be able to “be gone” from her house and explore.

As a kid, Dickson said, she worked with her parents to map out the safest route to go to visit her friends or to go to the pool. She shared those same lessons with her students, especially during a bike unit for fifth graders. She said the real-world lesson came through when a student who fell while biking on Ninth Street was able to get assistance right away because she and her dad had a safety plan in place.

Dickson is glad that her students have been receptive to those lessons.

“Biking is freedom. Walking is freedom,” Dickson said. “But there is the trust and safety that goes along with it.”

Since the program’s start, a higher percentage of students have been biking or walking to school, according to voluntary data collected by the health department.

When the program started in fall 2014, 14% of students walked or rode their bike to school. In fall 2023, that number was at 19%.

Collie-Akers said that information came from voluntary “travel tallies” shared with students at each elementary and middle school. Those tallies, as Dickson explains, are given out twice a year and tracked by teachers over a span of three days. That data becomes part of the exploration of how the Safe Routes program can promote more active transportation to school.

Dickson also said she and the district work in other ways to promote safe routes to school. Twice a year, the schools promote a walk to school and bike to school day. In previous years, Dickson said, they’ve even had cheerleaders from the University of Kansas cheer on the walkers and bicyclists. The next date for this type of activity is Oct. 9.

Before Mason worked in the planning office, he worked in Parks and Recreation for about a decade, which gave him an appreciation for an active lifestyle and the mental and physical benefits it can provide.

Collie-Akers said the Safe Routes program helps kids stay a little more grounded amid all the distractions of a typical day.

“We know there is a lot of competition for kids’ times, whether it’s electronics or other things that are more sedentary. Any opportunity to get kids being active is good,” Collie-Akers said.