photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

A crossing sign is pictured near Hillcrest Elementary on Tuesday, June 30, 2026.

As the City of Lawrence, the school district and their partners work to update their Safe Routes to School program for 2026, they’re reporting lower levels of students walking or biking to most schools in fall 2025 than in past years.

The city is currently in the process of updating the bike and pedestrian routes, along with Lawrence Public Schools and the city-county health department and planning organization. At the planning organization’s policy board meeting earlier this month, transportation planning manager Jessica Mortinger said there was still work to do before the route update was finalized.

“Before students were out of school, we had done a round of engagement with parents and guardians, and site visits to as many schools as we could get scheduled in the last few months of school,” Mortinger told the board. “We, of course, put that on pause,” she said, and when school starts up again, “we will go back and resume and bring some final drafts and finish up any other sites that we haven’t gone to visit.”

The draft routes, as they stand right now, are available to view on the city’s website at lawrenceks.gov/community-engagement/srts. So far, most of them look similar to the existing routes.

But the site also has summaries of the data the city has collected, and it sheds some light on how many students are walking and biking, as well as what concerns families have.

“We did travel tallies to the school and then we did a parent survey, so as part of that there’s summaries from every school about what we heard from parents and guardians about their kids walking and biking,” Mortinger told the board.

For the “travel tallies,” teachers in Lawrence Public Schools take two polls of their students each semester to find out how the students got to school and how they plan to get home. These numbers serve as a snapshot of trips to or from school on foot or by bike that day.

The city shared these stats for each elementary and middle school for fall 2025, as well as data from past fall semesters going back to 2021, though data is missing for some years at some schools. In 13 of the district’s 15 elementary and middle schools, the tallies for fall 2025 had the lowest rates of walking and biking of any of the past five fall semesters.

Before the work on the plan resumes, here’s a look at some of the takeaways — where students are walking and biking the most, and what stops them from doing so.

Why families aren’t walking or biking

The data the city has shared from 2025 includes surveys of parents and caregivers at each school. None of these surveys had more than 40 respondents, but families at most schools had some concerns in common.

In all of the elementary schools except Sunflower, more than 80% of respondents were concerned about the safety of intersections and crossings for students walking to school. And in all of the elementary schools but Quail Run and Langston Hughes, more than 80% of respondents had concerns about the amount or speed of vehicle traffic on the route.

In the middle schools and at Free State High School, intersections and traffic were also the two biggest concerns. At Lawrence High, the main things that kept students from walking were the distance from the school and the time it would take to walk.

There were some other factors that families were concerned about at some schools. At Schwegler Elementary, Billy Mills Middle School and Liberty Memorial Central Middle School, one of the top four barriers families reported was “concerns about crime or violence.” And six schools had poor-quality or absent sidewalks among their top four concerns: New York Elementary, Woodlawn Elementary, Hillcrest Elementary, Cordley Elementary, West Middle School and Liberty Memorial Central Middle School.

Who walks and bikes the most?

Most of the schools recorded less walking and biking in their fall 2025 tallies than they did in previous years. The only two elementary schools that didn’t see a decline from 2024 to 2025 were Quail Run, which has held around 15% to 17% for three years, and Cordley, which was around 20% in 2024 and 2025. All of the middle schools reported less walking and biking.

The school with the highest percentage of walking and biking in the fall 2025 tallies was Sunflower Elementary, where 25% of trips to and from the school were walked or biked.

But the school with the highest percentage in any of the last five fall semesters was Sunset Hill. There, 22.8% of trips were walked or biked in the fall 2025 tallies, but 34.6% were walked or biked in the fall 2024 tallies.

The school with the lowest percentage of walking and biking in its fall 2025 tally, and also the lowest percentage in any of the past five fall semesters, was Hillcrest Elementary. Eight percent of its trips in the fall 2025 tally were walked or biked, and its highest tally in the report is from fall 2024, when it reported 14.3% of trips were walked or biked.

In the parent or caregiver surveys for Hillcrest, which were completed by 25 families, more than 90% said they were worried about vehicle traffic on the route and about the safety of intersections and crossings. The report quoted two respondents who were concerned about Hilltop Drive; one said that cars frequently drive through a solid red light at the intersection of Ninth and Hilltop, and another said that Hilltop and Highland weren’t clearly marked as school zones.

“We walk because we live across the street, but IT IS NOT SAFE,” that respondent wrote.

If you want to learn more about your specific school, the data for each is available at lawrenceks.gov/community-engagement/srts. Mortinger said that data was posted to “close the feedback loop” with families who had taken part in the process.

“Here’s what we’ve heard,” Mortinger said. “Now, as we’re moving forward, what strategies and routes are we looking at?”

The public engagement process for Safe Routes to School is expected to resume in August.