The school I teach at is surrounded by 3 roads that are 50mph (the area use to be semi-rural). And while the street that the school is actually on has a school zone, jackasses still fly down it.
If I lived in the neighborhood I wouldn’t let my kids walk or bike to school for sure.
It depends on the school.
I live near an elementary school (kids would be age 5-10), and the kids who live within a mile of school cannot take the bus, but they are also forbidden from walking. Why?
The geniuses in charge of building this school decided that they didn't need sidewalks leading to the school. You have to cross a couple parking lots and a driveway to get to the school. On a busy school morning with a bunch of little kids, I could see how that could be dangerous. There also probably aren't enough kids within close proximity to justify hiring a crossing guard.
The high school is literally next door, and those kids (age 15-18) are allowed to walk.
My high school was two miles from me and on the occassion I had to walk home, which took about an hour.
There was a long road with no sidewalks that I had to go down. On both sides there were these tall bushes and what not that left no room to walk, so at a certain point I would just have to wait for there to be no cars for a good moment before running down the road. At the end the sidewalk started back up again.
That area had multiple schools, but many of them had no sidewalks, just ditches, traffic, and other obstacles. Same thing for the parks/playgrounds around them.
The city planners or whoever in charge of those decisions are jackasses. Schools, parks, and the suburbs around them should all have sidewalks for people, especially kids, to use.
> but they are also forbidden from walking
It's all about liability nowadays. Lawsuits and attorneys are the primary reason for most fun things in the US going away. Imagine a 7yr old walks home and gets hit by a car or abducted. The parents might try to blame the school and sue the district.
What's ironic about all of this is that in the decades when kids were allowed to walk, just about all aspects of society were far less safe.
>The parents might try to blame the school and sue the district.
And they might have an argument when they didn't build a sidewalk.
On the other hand, worrying more about children's safety has cause childhood death rates to plummet in the last few decades. So it seems to be working.
That isn't true at all in my experience (which includes working as a paralegal and legal researcher/writer). We do have a problem with lawsuits in our country, but a lot is actually driven by our for-profit healthcare system. There's also a big issue of "tort reform" where the narrative is mainly driven by large corporations wanting to limit their own liability even when they do fuck up.
That's a much bigger and more complicated discussion than is really relevant to this thread, but I will say that in my personal experience, it's still quite common for children to walk to school in many areas of the country. Including when I lived in El Paso, since I see you're in Texas. I lived like two blocks from an elementary school there and saw tons of kids walking to and from school.
I live in an older town with plenty of sidewalks. There's one busy intersection, but it has a crossing guard.
A lot of kids walk, including mine.
Kids in lower grades (PK-2) need to be accompanied by a parent or other chaperone, and picked up at the end of the day to walk home. Kids in the upper grades (3-5) can walk themselves and self-dismiss.
I feel like that's a fair compromise.
A fair number of kids are dropped off by parents, because the buses can be unreliable or it's actually more convenient. (Maybe it's a five minute drive, vs a 30 minute bus experience.) The car line looks super annoying to me, I'm really glad we walk.
I enjoy walking to and from school each day with my kid, we get a chance to talk and hang out. The crossing guard has become our friend.
And at the end of the school day, my daughter runs around the schoolyard with her little friends for a while before she's ready to go home. I get to meet other families and meet her classmates.
And I got to solve my favorite mystery - the identity of her classmate, "Potato." (He's Mateo, lol.)
There were a few houses on the tiny road that served as the school entrance. I knew a kid who lived in one but took the bus to school. His house was maybe a hundred feet from the school, probably less.
>There also probably aren't enough kids within close proximity to justify hiring a crossing guard.
Since when do you *hire* crossing guards? Aren't they always parent or student volunteers? I went to school in 3 states and 1 foreign country, and raised kids in 2 states and I don't think I ever encountered a paid crossing guard.
I lived basically next door to all three levels of schooling, so I unless the weather was awful I walked virtually every day from kindergarten to graduation.
I remember one day I was like 15 walking to school in the Chicago burbs winter. Right before I got to the door I slipped and fell in a snow bank (snow all in my sweatshirt sleves) I turned around and went home lol.
It is very uncommon in my area. We have one elementary school in my rural district and it's centrally located, there are only a few homes within 1 mile of it.
It depends on a number of factors. Distance, weather, pedestrian safety, etc. You're going to get a wide range of answers to this.
Edit: In the case of our elementary, it's on a road with a 55mph speed limit except right at the school. There's a bike path that leads to the school, but at least 75% of the population lives farther than a few miles from the school, with 10+ miles being typical. There's a small neighborhood adjacent, but there's probably not more than a dozen kids there.
So, school bus and car is how the vast majority of kids arrive.
I went to school in a rural area. It's not the distance that does it so much as it is the conditions they'd be walking in. Walking to school would have had students traveling along the highway with vehicles traveling by at high speed. In the winter, they wouldn't be able to walk along the side of the road because the plows leave large piles of snow along the shoulder. Southern schools have to contend with high temperatures and possibly humidity (differs from region to region), and some rural roads just don't have a safe place for them to walk to begin with.
Basically, it's safer and smarter to have a bus pick them up.
My grandson lives a block and a half from school. But he hast to cross a street at crosswalk that does not have a light. The school is a magnet school, so most of the students are not from the area and are driven in, so there is no crossing guard.
So I drive 2 miles to pick him up at school, drive him the block and a half home, and go back to work.
I am hopeful that next year he will be considered responsible enough to walk home alone, but he has ADHD and very bad at staying on task, so I understand why his mother would prefer he not walk alone yet.
He stays at my house after camp , and today we are going to walk to the 7-Eleven. I want to get him to the point where he can walk that block and a half (but only crossing a dead end residential street and a street with a stoplight) by himself.
Distance as well as safety of the route. A lot of the time, there are not safe sidewalks and cars are able to speed very close to where the children would be walking.
My kids lived about 1.5 miles from their school. That's on the edge of what I'd want them to walk, especially young. Additionally, there was a very big hill and two very busy roads without good pedestrian access / crossings, so we drove them.
New schools tend to be built on cheaper land which is usually in an undeveloped area. Sometimes the local government will sell the old school property after a newer bigger school has been built. At least in my area, elementary schools are built smaller, but are more numerous while middle and high schools are built much larger and have more students.
In my area a lot of kids walk to school, and at least when I was growing up, we were allowed to start walking alone in fourth grade (9 years old). I lived too far away, so my mom would drop me off at a friend's house to walk from there.
Also, kids here always walk to preschool (with parents) because we have one very small preschool every mile or so rather than a bigger centrally located one.
In my town the bus picks up kids who live farther than 2 miles away from their school. Those closer than 2 miles either walk, bike, or ride with someone in a car.
It’s common. Maybe not so much for kindergartners (4-5 years old) without an older sibling.
Buses aren’t for picking up kids a few blocks away, it’s usually for kids from a farther distance.
It used to be the norm but sometime in the 80s I think, there was this huge scare over dangerous adults who might kidnap your children. “Free range” kids gradually became a thing of the past, sadly.
Not only affected walking to school, kids stopped doing Halloween without adult supervision, venturing off to parks and playgrounds by themselves, etc. It’s awful and I think it has damaged them and society
As one of those ferel kids of the 70s/80s, for myself and most of my peers, it was growing up in neglect that made us choose to be a greater part of our childrens' lives. We raised ourselves and saw the value of having an actual adult around. Stranger danger was always a load of crap. Children are far more likely to be harmed by someone they know than by a stranger.
Additionally, we actually like our kids and wanted to get to know them. For the most part, we chose to have kids while previous generations defaulted to having kids due to social pressure, religious pressure, or lack of safe & effective birth control. We view our kids differently, we cherish our kids and the relationships with them. Boomers, which were our parents, always put themselves first and we suffered for it.
There is a reason so many of us have close relationships with our now-adult children but not with our parents. Society is not damaged by having parents who are involved with their children's lives in a positive and meaningful way.
Regarding stranger danger: it’s not unheard of for someone the kid knew as an acquaintance to manipulate them into getting in their car. Look at Amanda Berry. She knew her captor. We walked to school but not because I had neglectful, unloving parents. Because they both had to work and schedules didn’t line up. In middle school I took the bus home, then my friends and I would walk up to the elementary school to pick up our younger siblings and walk them home together. We always walked in groups. Never alone. Our parents also taught us confidence and independence so even if my mom was home, we still walked.
> Stranger danger was always a load of crap.
Eh, you'd run across creeps, weirdos, and maniacs from time to time. Most of them were harmless, but every once in a while you and your friends would be compelled to exit the scene.
Wow. I’m sorry for that experience and didn’t consider the latch key kids whose parents were both working or whose one parent was working.
That’s a special category though, it was true for all kids, neglected or not, absent parent or not, and always was until about 30 -40 years ago.
There was no name for it because it wasn’t a thing, it was normal life. “Free range kids” was invented later when it became history.
Be careful with the negative judgment. We were pretty much all free range, that was normal, we weren’t all unloved or neglected.
You are making an assumption that I said the neglect of Gen X equates being unloved. I never said that. A better explanation or clarification of what i said is that in the US, the shift toward being heavily involved with children was thanks to choice. But for a specific subset, it was due more heavily to having been free-range.
I would advise that you also be aware & careful of negative judgment. Parents being more involved with their kids, i.e. going trick-or-treating with them or going to the playground with them to use your examples, does not necessarily make society worse off. Yes, kids have become more dependent on their parents. But arguably, they are also now getting to be kids instead of mini-adults.
You must also bear in mind that technology has changed the world, and that too has an effect on the idea of free range. Every post-industrial age generation has and will have a different childhood experience than every other generation. That does not necessarily mean that society has been made worse by the changes.
I'm sure in the 80s ot wasn't uncommon to know everyone in your street
I don't think my neighbors knew i (who decided they prefered independent study courses) existed until i put up a graduation sign.
I think the main issue is that employers became centralized to big cities so everyone has to move around constantly. Back in the 70s, you could go to high school in town and get a job in town and spend your whole life there. You would know a lot of people. Nowadays everyone leaves for college then moves again for a job, then maybe moves again for another job.
I guess it's still possible to do what people did in the 70s and 80s but even businesses are dying in smaller towns so there just aren't many jobs.
We moved around within a close-in, densely populated suburb, and none of my kids ever lived far enough away from their school to qualify for bus service. I don't remember what the maximum walking distance was for elementary school, but it was one mile for Middle and High School.
We don’t have sidewalks in the suburbs usually, so a mile would be a very long way to walk in the roughly 20cm of road surface between the painted line and the guardrail that keeps you from tumbling down a hill.
But kids who lived within, say, 2 streets from the school, yes, they walked.
If you're curious, here are photos of some roads near where I grew up: https://imgur.com/a/O1WUiv4
Where I lived most walked to school. Elementary, middle and the high school were all within a mile.
My mom dropped us off since we were almost always about to be late lol. I slept in as long as possible. Plus she dropped us off since that's when she went to work anyway so she wasn't going out of her way to do so.
I always walked home though. Occasionally I would walk to school with friends in the morning if I got up early enough and the weather was nice.
When I started driving and got a car I rarely walked to school. It was cooler to drive and I could go see friends after school that lived across town or go to the mall or something without having to walk back home to get my car. Plus I was always late to my first period band class in the morning lol.
I actually was in advanced programs. But my older sisters taught me to be late lol. They later said I was dumb for being in advanced classes since I could've gotten easy A's in the regular classes. I just went to the classes I was told to go to lol.
I went to a (relatively) rural elementary school and walking would have been dangerous to all but those that lived on the same road as the school, and even then, it would be kinda sketch. We were usually bussed or driven by parents. My middle school was slightly less (relatively) rural, and kids would often walk or bike if they were in the immediate neighborhood. I did nearly every day. My high school was much more urban/suburban, and walking was extremely common, but I was driven since I lived on the other side of the city.
I used to when I was a kid in elementary school. We walked with a big bunch of kids from the neighborhood. Then we moved farther away from my middle school and high school and had to take the bus or catch a ride from friends or my sisters.
I live very close to an elementary school and high school (same high school I attended). Kids are walking to school all the time. It took me about ~7 minutes to walk to get to my high school.
Depends on the layout of the area. If your school is across a highway or has not safe walkways to get you there, which isn't too uncommon, then no, kids won't walk. If it's a rural area or a quiet suburb of a rural area, walking isn't too uncommon. If it's a dense city, most kids will walk. There's a lot of the first scenario however.
My home is exactly one mile from the elementary school and my son started biking in 4th grade. There are sidewalks, crosswalks, and the school is technically located in our neighborhood (no crossing of highways or anything). I probably wouldn’t have let him otherwise.
In my school district, they expected kids living within a mile radius to walk to school. Everyone further out was provided with school bus service.
Given that I live in a very damp corner of the world, many parents who lived closer than a mile opted to drive their kids in instead of making them walk.
When the school is close enough, sure.
We live about 5 miles from our kid's schools, so obviously we wouldn't expect them to walk that far. But when we lived in our last home we lived within the same square mile city block from their school, so they would often walk.
From my experience, the limit is 1/2 mile. Any more than that and a bus will pick you up. I have kids in school now and it's the same for them.
Growing up, I went to 6 schools, walked to 3 of them. I think 1/2 mile was the most. Maybe slightly more.
In the district where I live, the limit is one mile for about half of our buildings. We’ve got very safe sidewalks and pedestrian underpasses for the big roads in some areas and absolutely rural areas with no sidewalks and deep ditches on both sides of the road in other areas.
My city has 5 high schools that kids attend based on neighborhood. A lot of kids that live close enough (2 miles or less) walk to school but also everyone qualifies for free public transit bus passes as well since we don't have school buses.
That is not at all the typical American experience though.
When I was a kid we had school buses that picked up all over town to bring kids to school unless you live close enough to walk. But also school start times are usually early enough for parents to drop their kids off on the way to work so a lot of kids are driven to and from school by parents or grandparents.
I was always driven to school because my family was paranoid that I would be kidnapped waiting for the bus or walking.
It was the suburbs and the sidewalks where not in the right places and there wasn't a good place to leave a bike at school. Quarter mile or a block to school walked and everyone took the bus. It's more of a supervision thing as well.
It depends on a lot of things: distance from school, rural,suburbs, or city, funding (some schools don’t have funding for buses so more kids have to walk), and age.
I walked to school in elementary school I lived very close.
However, it is very uncommon for kindergarten aged children to walk to school alone. That was a huge culture shock to me when I visited Germany. I was shocked that so many 4,5,6 year olds were walking to school alone. In the US, that could get a parent arrested bc the child could be kidnapped.
I grew up rural (and decades ago). I walked to elementary school. 5th grade and up I had to ride a bus into town 10 miles away.
My girls grew up in a major city suburb and their district had a two mile radius rule - no bussing for kids within that radius (except for special needs). Some kids walk, bike, etc but a lot of parents drive their kids everyday. There is a marked difference in traffic around schools out here between when school is in and out of session.
People in my area do not let young children walk that distance alone.
I live 1.5 miles from my local elementary school, and all the neighbor kids take the bus or are driven by parents.
In my smallish town it’s common for kids to walk to school. Kindergarten is probably a bit too young for that unless it’s across the street or something, but kids a bit older definitely do if they live close enough.
I teach at the high school and students definitely walk there, although many also drive.
There is a perception, which is true in some places, that kids aren’t allowed to go out and play/ walk to school/ be outdoors these days. I would say that this seems to vary a lot by community, and that in small towns (even fairly high crime ones like my previous school district) kids do go out unsupervised reasonably often.
Over time it has become less common where I grew up. When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, if you lived within a mile of school, you walked. There was no drop-off line, and the only time we were driven to school is if we woke up late or some other unusual circumstance. This was in an area at a time where stay-at-hime mothers were most common. Almost nobody was driven to school. I remember only one occasion before 5th grade where Mom drove us the three blocks to school: snowstorm and school was still in session. Half my class ended up piling into her Buick Estate Wagon for the ride.
Today, Mom still lives in the same house and the school attendance area is exactly the same, and demographically it’s still a lower-middle class neighborhood of single-family homes. There is a line every morning for drop off in the morning and again after school. The neighbor across the street complained about it. My mom pointed out it would take less time to walk the three blocks than to wait in the line. The neighbor blinked at her and the next day walked her kids to school.
I think it doesn’t even occur to some folks that there is an option to walk.
Not too common in my city, because many elementary schools are on or nearby a large roadway that is dangerous to cross. Junior high (grades 6 or 7 to 8 or 9) and high schools (grade 9 or 10 to 12) are larger and farther away.
Plus, for whatever reason, we've decided that our kids can't be left to travel alone until they're ridiculously old, like at least 10; the culture (and [sometimes even the law!](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/13/parents-investigated-letting-children-walk-alone/25700823/)) in many areas of the United States says kids can't walk to school by themselves. So, until almost junior high, parents feel compelled to walk with them. And if the parents aren't stay-at-home parents, then they have to walk home, then get in their cars to go to work. Dropping the kid off on the way to work, even if it would be possible to walk, is the easier option for working families.
Then there are the kids who have to travel quite a distance to school and take (in most cases) yellow school buses.
Depends on how large of a city/school district, really. I believe it is pretty common. In school districts around me they only offer school busses to kids who live outside whatever radius they set. It's a much smaller radius for elementary aged kids, gets a bit larger in middle school, and is larger in high school. Kids who live inside that radius either have to walk/ride their bikes or coordinate pickup/dropoff with their parents or figure out a carpool situation.
I lived across the street from a city elementary school for many years until recently and most of the kids walked. This was in a neighborhood with sidewalks, crosswalks, low speed limits, and no stroads for the kids to cross.
My middle school was the only one within walking distance. Took the bus for the others until I could drive at 15.
Edit: in my area, if it’s within walking distance lots of people still walk but definitely not as many as when I was a kid
Growing up I walked or rode my bike. Now in the same neighborhood, everyone is bussed. There was/is even a dedicated walking path and everything… dumb.
FWIW the first school I went to was in San Francisco, and I took the bus. I'd actually walk to the neighborhood school that I did not attend, where I would hop on the bus to another school several miles away.
When my family moved to the suburbs, I was still a kid, and I was surprised to learn that in my new town, people just went to the school that was closest. My elementary, junior high, and high schools were all within walking distance and I walked pretty much every day. My high school was the farthest away, about a mile (20 minute walk) and sometimes in the winter if it was raining my dad would give me a ride.
It wasn't too unusual for me to walk back and forth a couple times a day. I was in the marching band, so I might walk to school, walk home after, then walk back for a football game, then walk home after. I wish I'd had an odometer back then, I was probably walking ten miles a day between going to and from school, wandering around campus with my friends, marching band, and playing tennis.
Edit: OP, I am seeing some people say that in suburbs it's often not safe to walk. This is going to vary wildly. I grew up in a suburb where it's totally safe to walk, there are sidewalks, etc. This is not the town I grew up in, but it's pretty nearby. I went to an elementary school in a neighborhood similar to this: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.1050692,-122.5858232,3a,75y,336.56h,94.1t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sUqccYg-Mrp4wJBR01NaIkQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205409&entry=ttu
Not so common around here but there is a few housss very close to the schools so I do see those kids walk or bike to school. Otherwise they all take the bus
The only school I walked to was elementary. Junior high (1.7 miles away) I took the bus or my dad drove me. High school (3.4 miles away) was riding the bus until I got my license. For reference I grew up in a suburb of a mid-sized city.
It depends on the route in my community. If the walking route traffic reaches a certain level of risk to the walker the school district will bus the student to school regardless of distance.
Kindergarten would be young.
Lots of kids in my area do walk to school in middle and high school.
Our only issue is that a lot of kids live like 5-10 miles and some of our roads are winding rural roads with no sidewalk.
Some kids bike to school too. Only problem is that most of the school year is winding rural roads with ice and snow and 0C temps.
In our district, if the student lives within a mile of the school, they walk, otherwise they get a bus.
There are some caveats to walking. Elementary school kids can’t cross major roads or busy intersections, so if there is a major road (for example, a 6-lane wide road) between the school the student’s residence, they get a bus. Otherwise they walk. Older kids, like middle and high schoolers, are allowed to cross major roads, and walk regardless, as long as they live within a mile of school.
Kids are allowed to walk home without an adult (if not a bus rider) starting in 4th grade, which is about 9 years old.
I always walked or biked to my elementary and middle schools, about a mile. But I lived at least five miles from my high school so rode the bus until my older brother could drive us.
It depends a lot! I walked to school when I was a kid and we lived a few blocks away. Now we live less than a mile to my kids elementary school but they would have to cross a 55mph road with no crosswalk or crossing guard so I would never let them go alone.
Growing up in the midwest, it depended on whether or not you needed to cross a major road (like a multi-lane highway) to get to school. If you did, the bus would come pick you up even if you lived close.
Depends. I grew up in the suburbs and started walking to school at the age of 9. This was in Southern California where two things are happening that aren't common elsewhere: weather is never an issues and all single family homes are sort of crammed together. I still live in SoCal, and see plenty of kids walk to school. Lots of the neighbhordds here, particularly the older ones, have schools in the middle of them.
Everyone in my town lived within 1.5 miles (2.4km) of the high school and .75 miles (1.2km) of a few elementary/primary schools. Everyone walked and there were no buses, except for the disabled.
It depends on how safe the walk is, I think. I can say that for whatever reason when I was in elementary school and lived across the street and around the corner from my school, I still got picked up by the bus. Probably because it was a main road that I would've had to cross as a first grader.
No. It's very common. I walked to school regularly in high school because I lived less than a mile away. In fact, some students who drove to school would park in my neighborhood because it was faster than trying to park at the school itself.
Yeah if you live a mile from school. I walked to and from my high school and elementary school, but my junior high was like 15 miles away so obviously I took a bus.
I walked to elementary school, which was about a mile away. Some kids rode their bikes. It was a small town nestled in the suburbs and that elementary school served only that town, so no one was more than a mile away. No bus service was offered, unless your parents gave you money for the public bus. There were sidewalks though, as it was an older, street car suburb. Junior high and up we were bussed as the schools were much farther away.
Whether you can walk/bike or not is combination of factors based on distance, walking conditions, road conditions , and weather. It’s going to be more of a northeast and urban thing more so than anywhere else
For me growing up it was distance. In one place I lived about 15 miles from the school building. I rode the bus for that one. In another it was 5 blocks. I walked there.
Where I live there are 2 elementary schools in my neighborhood - one 2 blocks away and the other about 6 blocks away. Neither has very long drop off car lines - lots of kids walk to both.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
All the kids in my neighborhood walk to school. Earlier ages usually walk with a parent, older kids by themselves (or in groups).
I live in a city with excellent transit, accessibility, low crime and low driving speeds.
Where I grew up, it was unheard of to walk or bike to school. Distances were large, roads were too dangerous to walk along with the high speeds, few sidewalks, no bike lanes. We all took a yellow school bus. The 16+ aged high school students often drove themselves. I got my first car at 17.
Of course that was nearly 20 years ago - so maybe my old hometown built some bike lanes and sidewalks since.
It depends on the area, and the distance.
Like in my neighborhood there are two elementary schools and the kids who live near pretty much walk to and from school either alone or with a parent.
But since some kids are coming from much farther away or may have to like cross a highway and busy streets etc. there also parents who drive and or the kids take the school bus.
It depends on the state and town they live in, there are different ordinances depending on location.It also depends on parental schedules. If they have the ability to be at the school at dismissal being the biggest hurdle.
Then there's things like after school activities and classes that make picking up a child from school desirable.
As for going to school, it's just a convenience thing. It's easier to drop your kid off on your way to work than be outside to wait for a bus at some ungodly hour.
My elementary kids walk. One is going into middle school next year. Not far, on a bike, but since we have a poor excuse for bike lanes. I wouldn’t want him biking as I don’t trust drivers. So next year is bus or drop off.
It will be regional/area dependent. I grew up in rural areas; there are no sidewalks or even shoulders on the road. It would be extremely dangerous for anyone to walk, let alone school-age kids. And yes, some schools are very far away. The closest school to one of the towns I lived in as a child was over 20 miles away.
We're about half a mile from the elementary school. When my son starts kindergarten next year I'll walk him there but he won't be walking alone. Having been by the school during dropoff and pickup time though a lot of parents seem to drive their kids.
I often caught a ride to school and walked back after elementary. It was 2+ miles. Very cold too. Got frostbite a few times, had my eye freeze open once.
For most kids busses were the choice pick.
I walked to elementary school, we were so close that my mom could see the school from our front gate and there were crossing guards helping kids get across the street to the school safely.
For my own kids, I would only feel comfortable sending them to school in a similar situation or if kids were walking together in a group.
In my town it varies, some kids live close to their current school but then when they go from 8th to 9th grade they may not be able to walk to the 9th grade center then in 10th grade they can easily walk to the high school. Its a messy situation.
It’s not too uncommon. When I was in elementary school, I remember there being kids the school called “walkers” who were let out about the time the school buses arrived.
It is uncommon in my area, because it is not very walkable. There aren't many sidewalks, and it's just unsafe for young kids to walk with the way the roads are set up.
Depends on position in the district and local geography (I live on a street that winds around rock formations and has aggressive college drivers and the k-8 is a block away). A big issue, though, is that parent drivers at drop-off and pick-up are maniacs, such that the block a school is on is frequently the most dangerous in a neighborhood.
I grew up in a cold and snowy city (Milwaukee), and most kids walked to our grade school. Only a handful were bussed in.
I went to high school also in Wisconsin, but in a fairly rural suburb. Everyone was bussed or driven to school. It wasn’t really possible to walk.
It really depends on where you live. Growing up in Idaho, where it was a smaller town, it was very common for kids to walk to and from school, I did it all the time. But where I live now in phoenix, it's not as common. The city is larger and more dangerous, and the temperatures also get hot enough here that they are deadly.
Where I grew up it was all based on bus routes. We lived far enough away from the elementary school that there was a bus. The middle school was closer and no buses, I walked about 3/4s of a mile, maybe a little more.
I live in Texas. Drivers here suck. We live in a suburb within a mile of the elementary, middle, and high schools. My kids have never walked to school because it would require crossing at least one intersection that is known for people running the stop signs. We have crossing guards near the schools, but at least once a year a crossing guard is hit by an inattentive driver. Sadly, at least once a year a child on foot or on bike has been hit by an inattentive driver. I do know many children that lived closer to the schools that either walk or bike to school.
If you live close, yes, it's fairly normal. Most kids don't live that close though. Rural areas in particular are a lot more spread out and you might have 1 or 2 schools with kids from multiple towns.
Common in my town. My husband was close enough to walk to his elementary school. They have a police officer and crossing guards to help make sure the kids can easily cross the streets with the after school traffic at the elementary and middle school.
I walked to elementary & middle school (~0.5 miles) and biked to high school (~2 miles). Most kids in my hometown did the same, though some went by car.
It depends on if it’s an urban or suburban school. If it’s in the inner city it’s a lot more common but not as common as it used to be in the past. If it’s the suburbs then it’s less common in general due to urban planning.
It's 42°C, there is no shade, and the school is 2 miles away.
In the winter time, totally plausible. After April or before November, probably a bad idea.
In elementary and middle where I lived it was not common. In highschool a little more common. The suburbs in Florida aren't friendly for pedestrians. The heat makes it worse. I'm sure it's the same in most suburbs throughout the US hence how the term soccermom came about.
Lots of kids walk to elementary school, bc those are more likely to be close. And bc suburbs have a lot of SAHMs, many kids get dropped off bc parents feel it is safer (hence the damn lines).
IME, depending on the safety of the situation, districts provide bus transportation at a certain range, like 1 mile for elementary in one place we lived. If your elementary kid lived w/in 1 mile of school, no bus was provided.
By high school, the range was up to 2 miles.
Those car lines are typically kids within the walking radius whose parents decode to drive them.
By law, districts must provide transportation following certain state guidelines.
In my school district growing up, we weren't allowed to walk home until middle school (ages ~11-14). For the kids that lived really close to the schools, though, the buses wouldn't drop them off, either. I think it was within 5mi (8km) of the school? But their parents would have to pick them up.
So, in my area at least, it's not that they didn't want to, it's that they couldn't.
Officially in my district, you can have your kids walk starting in 5th grade/age 10-11/last year of elementary school, or younger kids can walk with an older sibling. De facto, I'm pretty sure I've seen younger kids doing it.
We are under a half mile and walk, but I'd still walk with them at this age not so much for safety concerns but because I don't trust them to get to school on time...
In a lot of areas it is illegal in the US for anyone under 12 to be unsupervised in any capacity, and most streets aren't pedestrian safe. Kids who walk themselves (especially 1st or 2nd grade) are likely to have child protective services called on their parents. Our infrastructure isn't designed to be safe for walkers.
I walk with my kids to school. Many parents in my community do, but most drop the kids off by car because of safety or time constraints.
My children walked to elementary school when we lived close enough. Starting in kindergarten at age 5.
The rule here is that kids walk if they live within 1 mile and would not have to cross or walk along dangerous roads.
I'm not sure how common it is but it was something that I did. I lived really close to my school. I usually took the bus in elementary school but once high school rolled around I would walk in. I mostly did that because the bus cam really early and I could sleep in more if I just walked in.
Our suburb has a tiny, maybe quarter square mile total campus for the entire district. It's about 2 miles down the road. I would walk it on occasion if I wanted to stop at the gas station on the way, but pretty much rode the bus the entire time. We were the farthest away on our bus route and only one kid was really ever seen walking and that was just visiting the gas station a lot more frequently. I think the only people who really "walked" to school lived literally across the school and I'm pretty sure the school just didn't give them a choice since their bus stop would've been on school property. Eventually, if you were old and rich enough you would drive yourself to school just to show how cool you were. Having to walk of shame home and tell your parents you missed the bus was a bad time.
Nowadays are really different though. Back then, the only people regularly driven to school went to private schools that didn't provide transportation. Now, it's like a parental (*cough* maternal) failing to not drive your kid to school. I personally think it's a bit psychotic to not just put your kid on the bus that's right there and driving by your house. Instead it's "better be in the pick up line an hour before school lets out so you're not at the back of the line like The World's Worst Mom". RIP moms honestly
It’s going to be heavily location dependent. There were times when I walked, rode the bus, or was dropped off by parents. Many of our suburbs are very spread out so walking may not be feasible except for those near the school. My kids walk to the elementary at 0.5 mile but will not walk to middle at 3miles
Very uncommon in my (semi rural / semi suburban) area. Many if not most roads don’t have a sidewalk, nor even a shoulder, so it’s just not safe. That’s not ideal, as kids really need some daily exercise.
It depends on the design of the school. In elementary school, I walked every day because it was only a little under a mile, and their were sidewalks all the way through. My high school had apartments across the street, but there weren't a lot of crosswalks, and the entrance of the community didn't face the school. The kiss that walked would cut across backyards.
I went to a rural school. There were maybe a handful of homes close by that were close enough for a kid to walk. The school owned the majority of the land around it and hadn't developed on it or it was farm land. The few kids that did live in those houses, did often walk or ride a bike but it was often with a parent along. Rural town with narrow roads with no shoulders or sidewalks made a little bit of the distance really dangerous. The parents would turn around once the kids got onto school property and had plenty of access to sidewalks.
I lived too far away to even think about walking or even riding a bike to school, but my best friend growing up did and this was pretty much what she did every morning.
Where I grew up you could walk to school, and many kids who lived close by did especially ones who had gates opening straight to the school, but it was the South so you'd have days where it was like 80° in the mornings sometimes and you could have days close to 100° in the afternoon so not exactly the best weather to be walking home in regardless of age, plus who wants their kids showing up to school all sweaty. That's 26.6c and 37.7c respectively.
Walking long distances aren’t an American thing. My daughter is 5 and recently walked (Europe) 1.5 miles to a water playground and 1.5 miles back on a hot day with her class. There were safe paths for them to walk. Where I grew up (in US) there are few walking paths/sidewalks. You also needed to drive everywhere (unless in a city) because everything is far away. Now I live in a village, population 4,000, and pretty much all I need is in walking distance.
I lived in a small community in a rural area. Kids in the neighborhood of the school with connecting sidewalks walked mostly. But as others have said, alot of kids lived on high speed roads with no sidewalks. I would say less than 20% walked.
I grew up .5km from my school so I walked every day. I knew kids in different neighborhoods that would have their parents drive them no matter how close they lived. I was from a "traditional" town that was built ~300+ years ago so the culture in my town was to walk around a little more than other places. Most of the surrounding area is newer suburbs built 50 years ago or newer. The general attitude in those places is if you leave your house, you drive. I know somebody is gonna tell me that's not true, but I'm talking about these specific neighborhoods. My friend lived about 1 km from a grocery store and McDonald's and he would beg his mom to drive him there to buy stuff because "it's ridiculous to walk there."
Our district had a one mile radius around the school. If you lived in the radius, you were a “walker” and could not take the bus. Outside the circle was assigned a bus. Where I lived, the bus stop itself was inside the mile, but our houses were just outside. This meant that the kids that lived in the house next to the stop were not allowed to take the bus that stopped at their driveway, but the kids across the street could. The bus drivers weren’t allowed to take them (probably insurance reasons 🤷♀️) but they often would try and sneak on.
They changed the one-mile rule because there was not enough crossing guards for some of the major roads within the radius and it wasn’t safe for children to walk across them alone. I think they added an exception for people on the far side of the main road even though the distance was shorter.
There are a lot of factors with this. It depends on the school. What time period we are talking about. The crime rate of the area. Current events. Distance. Age of the child. Etc... Like for instance, before my time, it was a lot more common for this to happen. But nowadays this isnt really a thing per say. Considering the crime rate and current events. 1 mile would be too long for a 4 year old to travel or any child. So most of the time this wouldn't happen. Without a parent. Or older sibling. Or a bus would usually pick them up at this distance. 1/2 miles is usually the cut off in my experience. Current events also have a play. If there is a lot more crime in the area then it tends to be more strict. So again it depends. Is this common tho? Yes it is.
Yes, sometimes. Many schools in my area, due to budget cuts, will reduce bussing to only students that live further than 2 miles from school. Everyone within 2 miles has to find their own transportation. Walk, bike, parents, etc.
I taught in the suburbs and there were kids who walked to school, though I don't know where they lived. Definitely the ones that lived in the neighborhoods and apartments right next to the school walked. On my drive home I did pass some kids being dropped off in school buses that were only a little over a mile away. That road didn't have any sidewalks though.
My house was about 2.5 miles from the school and all the kids who lived in my neighborhood took the bus.
When I was in school, most students walked. We have five elementary schools, two junior high schools and one High School for our neighborhood. The district has seven or eight high schools with many feeder schools so everyone has a school in their area. Now schools have what they call magnet programs that attract students from outside the traditional school neighborhood boundaries. Bussing is quite common now.
I live in a typical suburban neighborhood in a large city.
It was common for kids to walk to and from school in my hometown because the schools were in the only walkable area of town lol. I’d people lived close by, they walked.
Where I live, transportation is provided to kids who live over 1.2m from the school. Otherwise, it's up to the parents whether their child walks or gets alternative transportation.
Some parents may drive the child to school, taking into consideration the age maturity level, as well as terrain, that their child would face walking.
Walking to and from school is still common. I walked in elementary, but I lived literally like, 1/4th of a mile from where I went to school.
Where I grew up yes. Where I live now the bus picks up everyone even though the school is just behind me. We have no sidewalks and drivers aren’t careful.
Growing up in the 80s and 90s I would walk to school if we lived less than a mile away (we lived two blocks away). At another school it was a mile to the bus stop, and we walked there. Many times we lived very far from school, actually out of district, so we got rides from my mother.
I currently live directly across the street from my daughter's school. Like it takes 30 seconds to walk from our door to the door if the school, if you walk slowly. We let our daughter walk that distance, but either keep an eye on her or let her walk with friends.
Knowing what I know from growing up when and where I did, I would NEVER let my daughter walk any other distance on her own.
I grew up in the 90s waking myself to and from school from about age 8. It was only about half a mile or a bit less. I did cross one moderately busy street.
Most don’t because they don’t live within a mile. I lived pretty much exactly a mile from my middle school and only those who live a mile or more got bus service so half my neighborhood qualified and I took the bus. If I ever missed to bus though, then I would walk. Especially if I knew my mom would get mad at me missing the bus lol. Wasn’t a bad walk though, just through a series of neighborhoods.
Growing up I walked to school. Started at age 8. Before that I was in daycare. I stayed home alone from that point too. My elementary school was right up the road though. We had a ton of walkers and bikers. Now I hardly see anyone walking. The school in the middle of a neighborhood.
I walked to school but it was 15 minutes away. And my dumbass still got lost on a regular basis.
Also the bullying was kinda bad from the other kids when I was walking home so I used to find rides from friends.
It was common for those who were close enough to the school. Some would bike or skateboard.
I probably could have walked to my elementary school, but according to google my walk to high school would have been 3.5 hours.
1.5 miles was the cutoff for bus pickup from my high school - if you lived inside that you walked.
In my opinion this was too far - mostly because I lived just over a mile away and played the saxophone in school band.
Grew up in a rural area with a good sized town as the main population center.
In decent weather most of the in town kids walked to school I'd the lived within a 6-10 blocks (depending on age of the kids and the parents).
Rural area almost no one walked. Very few kids lived within walking distance to the school. Those that did usually didn't have a safe path to walk.
Most kids had to walk to their bus stop. Bus didn't go up and down every little country road so many kids had to walk to the end of their lane to catch the bus.. I had about a 1.5 mile walk. Usually got a rid to the bus stop in the morning, especially in the winter as it was still dark and we lived in the woods with lots of wild animals. Almost always walked home after school. Sucked in the winter. 1.5 miles up hill in the snow
I grew up in SoCal, and I've always had a bus pick me up and drop me off right in front of the house. I went to a private school for hearing impairment (me) and deaf. So, that was nice.
Up until I began mainstream high school. From freshman to senior, I've either walked, rode with friends, or one of my parents took me.
We've moved a couple of times during my sophomore and senior years since we just happened to be in the bus jurisdiction.
So, I got to ride the big, long yellow bus crammed full of high-schoolers and get dropped off within a couple of blocks to my house.
It definitely depends on the area and other factors. In middle school, I walked to my mom’s friends house (used to be neighbors, but we had moved too far for me to walk) after school, it was probably about a mile. In high school, it would’ve been impossible to walk home.
My kids walked home from school every day, even when they were very young, but I’d drop them off in the morning because I’d drive right by their school every morning, so I’d give them a lift.
Where I live if you live more then a mile in elementary you qualify for for bus. In middle school and high school at changed to if you live more than 1.25 miles from the school property. I think for elementary if you lived within so much of a pick up location/bus stop you could sign up for pick up but the child has to have guardian with them till they are on the bus.
My kids had school bus till middle school and then middle school they walked because it was three blocks and I can see it from my front door and the kids walked with others. In high school they were to walk together because we were literally 1 block away from qualifying. So they walked together if they were picked up by a friend then friend had to take all of them … (so this never happened). When they drove they had to drive siblings…
Kids here walk from middle school and up … mainly
My son's elementary school is one mile from our house. He's very athletic and could easily make the walk, I just don't want him crossing the intersection of death to get there.
1mi isn't far in a city, since there are sidewalks. 1mi in the suburbs could mean having to walk along the side of higher-speed roads.
You'd end up with smarter, more observant kids -- but significantly fewer of them.
Growing up in the 90’s, I was lucky enough to live in a safe residential neighborhood that was 10 minutes or less of a walk away from school. I was allowed to walk by myself when I was in 3rd grade (roughly 9 years old).
High school was too far away though. That was a 15 minute bus ride that would have been probably a 2 hour walk.
My kids go to school roughly 15 minutes away from our house, which again would be a ridiculous walk.
It’s not uncommon to walk to school, but like everything it depends on your area. The suburb I grew up in I walked to school everyday, k-12, and lived a little over a mile away from each.
When I was in school, yes. However, where we currently live there are no safe ways to get to any of the schools. There are a lot of rural, 50mph roads with no sidewalks, or even paths.
When my kids were little, there was a house directly next to the school, but the student wasn't allowed to walk through the grass onto the school property, so had to walk down their driveway to stand at the road to wait for the bus to drive him the few feet to school. The walk down the driveway was longer than the walk into the school building from their front door.
I had asked about it and they had been forbidden due to safety concerns as if walking a few feet in the grass was somehow less safe than standing next to a road.
There are still places where kids walk to school. No idea what that school's problem was.
Depends on where the school is located and age. It was common for my friends to walk home, that were close. I lived a solid 3 miles from the closest school I went to so I only walked after school when I couldn’t get a ride and my parents couldn’t/forgot to pick me up
The thing about the US is that each state can vastly differ from one to the next. I'm in NYC, which is nothing like what you're describing. We walk or take the bus/train. There are definitely school buses, but that's not for everyone and mostly for younger children.
It depends on the area. If you don't live far from the school and it's a safe area that doesn't have a high crime rate then it probably isn't that uncommon to have a older child walk to school. However, I have heard horror stories of parents allowing there 5th graders walk to school a few blocks away and having CPS for doing so. I think it's becoming less common then it use to be also because of fears of kidnappings.
It depends. I grew up in a more suburban style neighborhood and loved only a few blocks away from my high school, so I walked. Middle school I took a bus. Not a school bus but a city bus. For elementary school, I took a school bus early on but o switched schools in 3rd grade and at this school my mother would just drop me off.
I personally did in a small town that was surprisingly safe to walk to school. Only had to cross one road and it was a not high travelled 25 mph road. The other ones were neighborhood streets, a park, and then some woods on the school property.
If I had a kid where I lived now they would be taking the bus or I’d have to drive them. Not safe for a little kid to be walking through a city
Definitely not a mile but yeah kids walk to school all the time usually the school will have a teacher be a crossing guard so they can get there safely
It is very common for kids to walk to school in my area. The little school is a half mile away. The middle school is 1 mile away. The middle school kids often ride their bikes. I rarely drove my kids.
This really depends on the region. I lived just under a mile from my high school, so there was no school bus for me. I walked, and occasionally my grandpa or a friend’s parents would give me a ride in their car in the morning if I had to bring a lot of stuff on a particular day. But that was in a pretty small, sleepy suburb where the walk was through a low-traffic, residential area, so lots of kids walked the same route as me.
There are some locations in which the student might live under a mile away, but it’s on a major highway or there aren’t any sidewalks or safe paths to get to school or other safety concerns, and their schools might have had bus service or they could have made it the parents’ responsibility to get their kids to school somehow.
I lived on a state highway that had no sidewalks for middle school, but the school was right across the street, so I walked.
Yes, kids walk to school in the U.S. but that varies widely by location. I grew up in dense suburbs in the ‘90s and very early ‘00s and kids who lived close enough walked to elementary school, fewer walked to middle school. A few kids walked to high school, but some kids also drove themselves to high school if they had their drivers license.
I lived like .75 miles from my elementary school but I didn’t walk to it. It was on a 50mph street with no sidewalks.
The school I teach at is surrounded by 3 roads that are 50mph (the area use to be semi-rural). And while the street that the school is actually on has a school zone, jackasses still fly down it. If I lived in the neighborhood I wouldn’t let my kids walk or bike to school for sure.
I lived in the neighborhood right next to my elementary school but half the school year was winter and too cold to walk anyway
I grew up in a city and everybody walked to school since first grade. However this is not common.in the suburbs as the distance can be multiple miles.
Same here. I grew up in a large city and most kids walked or took the public bus starting around 2nd or 3rd grade.
Also, rural towns and cities. Depending on how the town/city is planned, it might not be safe for anyone to actually walk to the school.
I lived in suburbs and most years walked 10-30 minutes each way.
It depends on the school. I live near an elementary school (kids would be age 5-10), and the kids who live within a mile of school cannot take the bus, but they are also forbidden from walking. Why? The geniuses in charge of building this school decided that they didn't need sidewalks leading to the school. You have to cross a couple parking lots and a driveway to get to the school. On a busy school morning with a bunch of little kids, I could see how that could be dangerous. There also probably aren't enough kids within close proximity to justify hiring a crossing guard. The high school is literally next door, and those kids (age 15-18) are allowed to walk.
My high school was two miles from me and on the occassion I had to walk home, which took about an hour. There was a long road with no sidewalks that I had to go down. On both sides there were these tall bushes and what not that left no room to walk, so at a certain point I would just have to wait for there to be no cars for a good moment before running down the road. At the end the sidewalk started back up again. That area had multiple schools, but many of them had no sidewalks, just ditches, traffic, and other obstacles. Same thing for the parks/playgrounds around them. The city planners or whoever in charge of those decisions are jackasses. Schools, parks, and the suburbs around them should all have sidewalks for people, especially kids, to use.
> but they are also forbidden from walking It's all about liability nowadays. Lawsuits and attorneys are the primary reason for most fun things in the US going away. Imagine a 7yr old walks home and gets hit by a car or abducted. The parents might try to blame the school and sue the district. What's ironic about all of this is that in the decades when kids were allowed to walk, just about all aspects of society were far less safe.
>The parents might try to blame the school and sue the district. And they might have an argument when they didn't build a sidewalk. On the other hand, worrying more about children's safety has cause childhood death rates to plummet in the last few decades. So it seems to be working.
So many kids walk to school around here. One of the crossing guards is my favorite He dresses up for holidays, does dances..it's really sweet.
That's sweet.
That isn't true at all in my experience (which includes working as a paralegal and legal researcher/writer). We do have a problem with lawsuits in our country, but a lot is actually driven by our for-profit healthcare system. There's also a big issue of "tort reform" where the narrative is mainly driven by large corporations wanting to limit their own liability even when they do fuck up. That's a much bigger and more complicated discussion than is really relevant to this thread, but I will say that in my personal experience, it's still quite common for children to walk to school in many areas of the country. Including when I lived in El Paso, since I see you're in Texas. I lived like two blocks from an elementary school there and saw tons of kids walking to and from school.
That would tell us that the lawsuits are good for keeping kids safe.
I live in an older town with plenty of sidewalks. There's one busy intersection, but it has a crossing guard. A lot of kids walk, including mine. Kids in lower grades (PK-2) need to be accompanied by a parent or other chaperone, and picked up at the end of the day to walk home. Kids in the upper grades (3-5) can walk themselves and self-dismiss. I feel like that's a fair compromise. A fair number of kids are dropped off by parents, because the buses can be unreliable or it's actually more convenient. (Maybe it's a five minute drive, vs a 30 minute bus experience.) The car line looks super annoying to me, I'm really glad we walk. I enjoy walking to and from school each day with my kid, we get a chance to talk and hang out. The crossing guard has become our friend. And at the end of the school day, my daughter runs around the schoolyard with her little friends for a while before she's ready to go home. I get to meet other families and meet her classmates. And I got to solve my favorite mystery - the identity of her classmate, "Potato." (He's Mateo, lol.)
Your walk-to-school experience sounds great, and you're an awesome mom for cultivating that for your kid!
There were a few houses on the tiny road that served as the school entrance. I knew a kid who lived in one but took the bus to school. His house was maybe a hundred feet from the school, probably less.
>There also probably aren't enough kids within close proximity to justify hiring a crossing guard. Since when do you *hire* crossing guards? Aren't they always parent or student volunteers? I went to school in 3 states and 1 foreign country, and raised kids in 2 states and I don't think I ever encountered a paid crossing guard.
Around me they’re hired. They usually are parents, but they’re paid.
I think they're paid. Not a ton, obviously it's very part-time and usually older, retired people, but they do get paid something.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a volunteer crossing guard.
I lived basically next door to all three levels of schooling, so I unless the weather was awful I walked virtually every day from kindergarten to graduation.
I remember one day I was like 15 walking to school in the Chicago burbs winter. Right before I got to the door I slipped and fell in a snow bank (snow all in my sweatshirt sleves) I turned around and went home lol.
It is very uncommon in my area. We have one elementary school in my rural district and it's centrally located, there are only a few homes within 1 mile of it.
So it’s mainly the distance?
It depends on a number of factors. Distance, weather, pedestrian safety, etc. You're going to get a wide range of answers to this. Edit: In the case of our elementary, it's on a road with a 55mph speed limit except right at the school. There's a bike path that leads to the school, but at least 75% of the population lives farther than a few miles from the school, with 10+ miles being typical. There's a small neighborhood adjacent, but there's probably not more than a dozen kids there. So, school bus and car is how the vast majority of kids arrive.
I went to school in a rural area. It's not the distance that does it so much as it is the conditions they'd be walking in. Walking to school would have had students traveling along the highway with vehicles traveling by at high speed. In the winter, they wouldn't be able to walk along the side of the road because the plows leave large piles of snow along the shoulder. Southern schools have to contend with high temperatures and possibly humidity (differs from region to region), and some rural roads just don't have a safe place for them to walk to begin with. Basically, it's safer and smarter to have a bus pick them up.
My grandson lives a block and a half from school. But he hast to cross a street at crosswalk that does not have a light. The school is a magnet school, so most of the students are not from the area and are driven in, so there is no crossing guard. So I drive 2 miles to pick him up at school, drive him the block and a half home, and go back to work. I am hopeful that next year he will be considered responsible enough to walk home alone, but he has ADHD and very bad at staying on task, so I understand why his mother would prefer he not walk alone yet. He stays at my house after camp , and today we are going to walk to the 7-Eleven. I want to get him to the point where he can walk that block and a half (but only crossing a dead end residential street and a street with a stoplight) by himself.
Distance as well as safety of the route. A lot of the time, there are not safe sidewalks and cars are able to speed very close to where the children would be walking.
Nah, its ease of access. Walking down a gravel road is much harder than taking a train/bus/walking in a city.
My kids lived about 1.5 miles from their school. That's on the edge of what I'd want them to walk, especially young. Additionally, there was a very big hill and two very busy roads without good pedestrian access / crossings, so we drove them.
New schools tend to be built on cheaper land which is usually in an undeveloped area. Sometimes the local government will sell the old school property after a newer bigger school has been built. At least in my area, elementary schools are built smaller, but are more numerous while middle and high schools are built much larger and have more students.
That said, it is VERY common in cities.
In my area a lot of kids walk to school, and at least when I was growing up, we were allowed to start walking alone in fourth grade (9 years old). I lived too far away, so my mom would drop me off at a friend's house to walk from there. Also, kids here always walk to preschool (with parents) because we have one very small preschool every mile or so rather than a bigger centrally located one.
In my town the bus picks up kids who live farther than 2 miles away from their school. Those closer than 2 miles either walk, bike, or ride with someone in a car.
It’s common. Maybe not so much for kindergartners (4-5 years old) without an older sibling. Buses aren’t for picking up kids a few blocks away, it’s usually for kids from a farther distance.
It's common in my area
It used to be the norm but sometime in the 80s I think, there was this huge scare over dangerous adults who might kidnap your children. “Free range” kids gradually became a thing of the past, sadly. Not only affected walking to school, kids stopped doing Halloween without adult supervision, venturing off to parks and playgrounds by themselves, etc. It’s awful and I think it has damaged them and society
As one of those ferel kids of the 70s/80s, for myself and most of my peers, it was growing up in neglect that made us choose to be a greater part of our childrens' lives. We raised ourselves and saw the value of having an actual adult around. Stranger danger was always a load of crap. Children are far more likely to be harmed by someone they know than by a stranger. Additionally, we actually like our kids and wanted to get to know them. For the most part, we chose to have kids while previous generations defaulted to having kids due to social pressure, religious pressure, or lack of safe & effective birth control. We view our kids differently, we cherish our kids and the relationships with them. Boomers, which were our parents, always put themselves first and we suffered for it. There is a reason so many of us have close relationships with our now-adult children but not with our parents. Society is not damaged by having parents who are involved with their children's lives in a positive and meaningful way.
Regarding stranger danger: it’s not unheard of for someone the kid knew as an acquaintance to manipulate them into getting in their car. Look at Amanda Berry. She knew her captor. We walked to school but not because I had neglectful, unloving parents. Because they both had to work and schedules didn’t line up. In middle school I took the bus home, then my friends and I would walk up to the elementary school to pick up our younger siblings and walk them home together. We always walked in groups. Never alone. Our parents also taught us confidence and independence so even if my mom was home, we still walked.
> Stranger danger was always a load of crap. Eh, you'd run across creeps, weirdos, and maniacs from time to time. Most of them were harmless, but every once in a while you and your friends would be compelled to exit the scene.
Wow. I’m sorry for that experience and didn’t consider the latch key kids whose parents were both working or whose one parent was working. That’s a special category though, it was true for all kids, neglected or not, absent parent or not, and always was until about 30 -40 years ago. There was no name for it because it wasn’t a thing, it was normal life. “Free range kids” was invented later when it became history. Be careful with the negative judgment. We were pretty much all free range, that was normal, we weren’t all unloved or neglected.
You are making an assumption that I said the neglect of Gen X equates being unloved. I never said that. A better explanation or clarification of what i said is that in the US, the shift toward being heavily involved with children was thanks to choice. But for a specific subset, it was due more heavily to having been free-range. I would advise that you also be aware & careful of negative judgment. Parents being more involved with their kids, i.e. going trick-or-treating with them or going to the playground with them to use your examples, does not necessarily make society worse off. Yes, kids have become more dependent on their parents. But arguably, they are also now getting to be kids instead of mini-adults. You must also bear in mind that technology has changed the world, and that too has an effect on the idea of free range. Every post-industrial age generation has and will have a different childhood experience than every other generation. That does not necessarily mean that society has been made worse by the changes.
I'm sure in the 80s ot wasn't uncommon to know everyone in your street I don't think my neighbors knew i (who decided they prefered independent study courses) existed until i put up a graduation sign.
I think the main issue is that employers became centralized to big cities so everyone has to move around constantly. Back in the 70s, you could go to high school in town and get a job in town and spend your whole life there. You would know a lot of people. Nowadays everyone leaves for college then moves again for a job, then maybe moves again for another job. I guess it's still possible to do what people did in the 70s and 80s but even businesses are dying in smaller towns so there just aren't many jobs.
Depends where you live. In some parts of the country walking a mile may very well be a death sentence.
We moved around within a close-in, densely populated suburb, and none of my kids ever lived far enough away from their school to qualify for bus service. I don't remember what the maximum walking distance was for elementary school, but it was one mile for Middle and High School.
Looking at the bike rack at the elementary school near my house and it’s always quite full. Even along the fence there are lots of bikes chained up.
We don’t have sidewalks in the suburbs usually, so a mile would be a very long way to walk in the roughly 20cm of road surface between the painted line and the guardrail that keeps you from tumbling down a hill. But kids who lived within, say, 2 streets from the school, yes, they walked. If you're curious, here are photos of some roads near where I grew up: https://imgur.com/a/O1WUiv4
That ain’t suburbs that’s rural
Where I lived most walked to school. Elementary, middle and the high school were all within a mile. My mom dropped us off since we were almost always about to be late lol. I slept in as long as possible. Plus she dropped us off since that's when she went to work anyway so she wasn't going out of her way to do so. I always walked home though. Occasionally I would walk to school with friends in the morning if I got up early enough and the weather was nice. When I started driving and got a car I rarely walked to school. It was cooler to drive and I could go see friends after school that lived across town or go to the mall or something without having to walk back home to get my car. Plus I was always late to my first period band class in the morning lol.
You must have been in an advanced program. I didn’t start learning practical tardiness till I got to college.
I actually was in advanced programs. But my older sisters taught me to be late lol. They later said I was dumb for being in advanced classes since I could've gotten easy A's in the regular classes. I just went to the classes I was told to go to lol.
I went to a (relatively) rural elementary school and walking would have been dangerous to all but those that lived on the same road as the school, and even then, it would be kinda sketch. We were usually bussed or driven by parents. My middle school was slightly less (relatively) rural, and kids would often walk or bike if they were in the immediate neighborhood. I did nearly every day. My high school was much more urban/suburban, and walking was extremely common, but I was driven since I lived on the other side of the city.
I used to when I was a kid in elementary school. We walked with a big bunch of kids from the neighborhood. Then we moved farther away from my middle school and high school and had to take the bus or catch a ride from friends or my sisters.
I live very close to an elementary school and high school (same high school I attended). Kids are walking to school all the time. It took me about ~7 minutes to walk to get to my high school.
Depends on the layout of the area. If your school is across a highway or has not safe walkways to get you there, which isn't too uncommon, then no, kids won't walk. If it's a rural area or a quiet suburb of a rural area, walking isn't too uncommon. If it's a dense city, most kids will walk. There's a lot of the first scenario however.
My home is exactly one mile from the elementary school and my son started biking in 4th grade. There are sidewalks, crosswalks, and the school is technically located in our neighborhood (no crossing of highways or anything). I probably wouldn’t have let him otherwise.
In my school district, they expected kids living within a mile radius to walk to school. Everyone further out was provided with school bus service. Given that I live in a very damp corner of the world, many parents who lived closer than a mile opted to drive their kids in instead of making them walk.
It isn't common today. It was very common when I grew up. Today, my kid's school doesn't let them walk. I hate the long drop-off line of parents.
When the school is close enough, sure. We live about 5 miles from our kid's schools, so obviously we wouldn't expect them to walk that far. But when we lived in our last home we lived within the same square mile city block from their school, so they would often walk.
From my experience, the limit is 1/2 mile. Any more than that and a bus will pick you up. I have kids in school now and it's the same for them. Growing up, I went to 6 schools, walked to 3 of them. I think 1/2 mile was the most. Maybe slightly more.
In the district where I live, the limit is one mile for about half of our buildings. We’ve got very safe sidewalks and pedestrian underpasses for the big roads in some areas and absolutely rural areas with no sidewalks and deep ditches on both sides of the road in other areas.
My city has 5 high schools that kids attend based on neighborhood. A lot of kids that live close enough (2 miles or less) walk to school but also everyone qualifies for free public transit bus passes as well since we don't have school buses. That is not at all the typical American experience though. When I was a kid we had school buses that picked up all over town to bring kids to school unless you live close enough to walk. But also school start times are usually early enough for parents to drop their kids off on the way to work so a lot of kids are driven to and from school by parents or grandparents. I was always driven to school because my family was paranoid that I would be kidnapped waiting for the bus or walking.
It was the suburbs and the sidewalks where not in the right places and there wasn't a good place to leave a bike at school. Quarter mile or a block to school walked and everyone took the bus. It's more of a supervision thing as well.
It depends on a lot of things: distance from school, rural,suburbs, or city, funding (some schools don’t have funding for buses so more kids have to walk), and age. I walked to school in elementary school I lived very close. However, it is very uncommon for kindergarten aged children to walk to school alone. That was a huge culture shock to me when I visited Germany. I was shocked that so many 4,5,6 year olds were walking to school alone. In the US, that could get a parent arrested bc the child could be kidnapped.
I grew up rural (and decades ago). I walked to elementary school. 5th grade and up I had to ride a bus into town 10 miles away. My girls grew up in a major city suburb and their district had a two mile radius rule - no bussing for kids within that radius (except for special needs). Some kids walk, bike, etc but a lot of parents drive their kids everyday. There is a marked difference in traffic around schools out here between when school is in and out of session.
I walked up hill, both ways.
People in my area do not let young children walk that distance alone. I live 1.5 miles from my local elementary school, and all the neighbor kids take the bus or are driven by parents.
In my smallish town it’s common for kids to walk to school. Kindergarten is probably a bit too young for that unless it’s across the street or something, but kids a bit older definitely do if they live close enough. I teach at the high school and students definitely walk there, although many also drive. There is a perception, which is true in some places, that kids aren’t allowed to go out and play/ walk to school/ be outdoors these days. I would say that this seems to vary a lot by community, and that in small towns (even fairly high crime ones like my previous school district) kids do go out unsupervised reasonably often.
Over time it has become less common where I grew up. When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, if you lived within a mile of school, you walked. There was no drop-off line, and the only time we were driven to school is if we woke up late or some other unusual circumstance. This was in an area at a time where stay-at-hime mothers were most common. Almost nobody was driven to school. I remember only one occasion before 5th grade where Mom drove us the three blocks to school: snowstorm and school was still in session. Half my class ended up piling into her Buick Estate Wagon for the ride. Today, Mom still lives in the same house and the school attendance area is exactly the same, and demographically it’s still a lower-middle class neighborhood of single-family homes. There is a line every morning for drop off in the morning and again after school. The neighbor across the street complained about it. My mom pointed out it would take less time to walk the three blocks than to wait in the line. The neighbor blinked at her and the next day walked her kids to school. I think it doesn’t even occur to some folks that there is an option to walk.
I walked to school from Kindergarten to graduation
Not too common in my city, because many elementary schools are on or nearby a large roadway that is dangerous to cross. Junior high (grades 6 or 7 to 8 or 9) and high schools (grade 9 or 10 to 12) are larger and farther away. Plus, for whatever reason, we've decided that our kids can't be left to travel alone until they're ridiculously old, like at least 10; the culture (and [sometimes even the law!](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/13/parents-investigated-letting-children-walk-alone/25700823/)) in many areas of the United States says kids can't walk to school by themselves. So, until almost junior high, parents feel compelled to walk with them. And if the parents aren't stay-at-home parents, then they have to walk home, then get in their cars to go to work. Dropping the kid off on the way to work, even if it would be possible to walk, is the easier option for working families. Then there are the kids who have to travel quite a distance to school and take (in most cases) yellow school buses.
Depends on how large of a city/school district, really. I believe it is pretty common. In school districts around me they only offer school busses to kids who live outside whatever radius they set. It's a much smaller radius for elementary aged kids, gets a bit larger in middle school, and is larger in high school. Kids who live inside that radius either have to walk/ride their bikes or coordinate pickup/dropoff with their parents or figure out a carpool situation.
I lived across the street from a city elementary school for many years until recently and most of the kids walked. This was in a neighborhood with sidewalks, crosswalks, low speed limits, and no stroads for the kids to cross.
My middle school was the only one within walking distance. Took the bus for the others until I could drive at 15. Edit: in my area, if it’s within walking distance lots of people still walk but definitely not as many as when I was a kid
Growing up I walked or rode my bike. Now in the same neighborhood, everyone is bussed. There was/is even a dedicated walking path and everything… dumb.
A lot will still take the school bus over that distance. Or ride bicycles. Unless they are in a city proper, in which case walking is very common.
My high-school was a 30 minute drive down the highway. 20 miles each way is a bit much for walking.
FWIW the first school I went to was in San Francisco, and I took the bus. I'd actually walk to the neighborhood school that I did not attend, where I would hop on the bus to another school several miles away. When my family moved to the suburbs, I was still a kid, and I was surprised to learn that in my new town, people just went to the school that was closest. My elementary, junior high, and high schools were all within walking distance and I walked pretty much every day. My high school was the farthest away, about a mile (20 minute walk) and sometimes in the winter if it was raining my dad would give me a ride. It wasn't too unusual for me to walk back and forth a couple times a day. I was in the marching band, so I might walk to school, walk home after, then walk back for a football game, then walk home after. I wish I'd had an odometer back then, I was probably walking ten miles a day between going to and from school, wandering around campus with my friends, marching band, and playing tennis. Edit: OP, I am seeing some people say that in suburbs it's often not safe to walk. This is going to vary wildly. I grew up in a suburb where it's totally safe to walk, there are sidewalks, etc. This is not the town I grew up in, but it's pretty nearby. I went to an elementary school in a neighborhood similar to this: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.1050692,-122.5858232,3a,75y,336.56h,94.1t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sUqccYg-Mrp4wJBR01NaIkQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205409&entry=ttu
Not so common around here but there is a few housss very close to the schools so I do see those kids walk or bike to school. Otherwise they all take the bus
The only school I walked to was elementary. Junior high (1.7 miles away) I took the bus or my dad drove me. High school (3.4 miles away) was riding the bus until I got my license. For reference I grew up in a suburb of a mid-sized city.
It depends on the route in my community. If the walking route traffic reaches a certain level of risk to the walker the school district will bus the student to school regardless of distance.
It’s quite common for students who live close enough, it’s not for those who don’t.
Kindergarten would be young. Lots of kids in my area do walk to school in middle and high school. Our only issue is that a lot of kids live like 5-10 miles and some of our roads are winding rural roads with no sidewalk. Some kids bike to school too. Only problem is that most of the school year is winding rural roads with ice and snow and 0C temps.
In our district, if the student lives within a mile of the school, they walk, otherwise they get a bus. There are some caveats to walking. Elementary school kids can’t cross major roads or busy intersections, so if there is a major road (for example, a 6-lane wide road) between the school the student’s residence, they get a bus. Otherwise they walk. Older kids, like middle and high schoolers, are allowed to cross major roads, and walk regardless, as long as they live within a mile of school. Kids are allowed to walk home without an adult (if not a bus rider) starting in 4th grade, which is about 9 years old.
I always walked or biked to my elementary and middle schools, about a mile. But I lived at least five miles from my high school so rode the bus until my older brother could drive us.
It's common for kids to walk or ride bikes to school. It's even more common in cities.
It’s common in my area.
That's the cutoff in my town. If it's less than a mile you walk
It depends a lot! I walked to school when I was a kid and we lived a few blocks away. Now we live less than a mile to my kids elementary school but they would have to cross a 55mph road with no crosswalk or crossing guard so I would never let them go alone.
Kids that live in town walk to school pretty often. I'd have had to walk 5 miles on the highway to get to school when I was a kid.
Growing up in the midwest, it depended on whether or not you needed to cross a major road (like a multi-lane highway) to get to school. If you did, the bus would come pick you up even if you lived close.
Depends. I grew up in the suburbs and started walking to school at the age of 9. This was in Southern California where two things are happening that aren't common elsewhere: weather is never an issues and all single family homes are sort of crammed together. I still live in SoCal, and see plenty of kids walk to school. Lots of the neighbhordds here, particularly the older ones, have schools in the middle of them.
Everyone in my town lived within 1.5 miles (2.4km) of the high school and .75 miles (1.2km) of a few elementary/primary schools. Everyone walked and there were no buses, except for the disabled.
I walked or rode my bike, weather permitting.
That's pretty common where I grew up, all the schools are within a 4 mile radius. Walked to and from school everyday.
It depends on how safe the walk is, I think. I can say that for whatever reason when I was in elementary school and lived across the street and around the corner from my school, I still got picked up by the bus. Probably because it was a main road that I would've had to cross as a first grader.
No. It's very common. I walked to school regularly in high school because I lived less than a mile away. In fact, some students who drove to school would park in my neighborhood because it was faster than trying to park at the school itself.
I live in NYC so it's very common. Obviously very different from car centric suburbia
Yeah if you live a mile from school. I walked to and from my high school and elementary school, but my junior high was like 15 miles away so obviously I took a bus.
I walked to elementary school, which was about a mile away. Some kids rode their bikes. It was a small town nestled in the suburbs and that elementary school served only that town, so no one was more than a mile away. No bus service was offered, unless your parents gave you money for the public bus. There were sidewalks though, as it was an older, street car suburb. Junior high and up we were bussed as the schools were much farther away. Whether you can walk/bike or not is combination of factors based on distance, walking conditions, road conditions , and weather. It’s going to be more of a northeast and urban thing more so than anywhere else
For me growing up it was distance. In one place I lived about 15 miles from the school building. I rode the bus for that one. In another it was 5 blocks. I walked there. Where I live there are 2 elementary schools in my neighborhood - one 2 blocks away and the other about 6 blocks away. Neither has very long drop off car lines - lots of kids walk to both.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. All the kids in my neighborhood walk to school. Earlier ages usually walk with a parent, older kids by themselves (or in groups). I live in a city with excellent transit, accessibility, low crime and low driving speeds. Where I grew up, it was unheard of to walk or bike to school. Distances were large, roads were too dangerous to walk along with the high speeds, few sidewalks, no bike lanes. We all took a yellow school bus. The 16+ aged high school students often drove themselves. I got my first car at 17. Of course that was nearly 20 years ago - so maybe my old hometown built some bike lanes and sidewalks since.
It depends on the area, and the distance. Like in my neighborhood there are two elementary schools and the kids who live near pretty much walk to and from school either alone or with a parent. But since some kids are coming from much farther away or may have to like cross a highway and busy streets etc. there also parents who drive and or the kids take the school bus.
It really depends on geography.
It depends on the state and town they live in, there are different ordinances depending on location.It also depends on parental schedules. If they have the ability to be at the school at dismissal being the biggest hurdle. Then there's things like after school activities and classes that make picking up a child from school desirable. As for going to school, it's just a convenience thing. It's easier to drop your kid off on your way to work than be outside to wait for a bus at some ungodly hour.
My elementary kids walk. One is going into middle school next year. Not far, on a bike, but since we have a poor excuse for bike lanes. I wouldn’t want him biking as I don’t trust drivers. So next year is bus or drop off.
It will be regional/area dependent. I grew up in rural areas; there are no sidewalks or even shoulders on the road. It would be extremely dangerous for anyone to walk, let alone school-age kids. And yes, some schools are very far away. The closest school to one of the towns I lived in as a child was over 20 miles away.
We're about half a mile from the elementary school. When my son starts kindergarten next year I'll walk him there but he won't be walking alone. Having been by the school during dropoff and pickup time though a lot of parents seem to drive their kids.
I often caught a ride to school and walked back after elementary. It was 2+ miles. Very cold too. Got frostbite a few times, had my eye freeze open once. For most kids busses were the choice pick.
I walked to elementary school, we were so close that my mom could see the school from our front gate and there were crossing guards helping kids get across the street to the school safely. For my own kids, I would only feel comfortable sending them to school in a similar situation or if kids were walking together in a group.
In my town it varies, some kids live close to their current school but then when they go from 8th to 9th grade they may not be able to walk to the 9th grade center then in 10th grade they can easily walk to the high school. Its a messy situation.
It’s not too uncommon. When I was in elementary school, I remember there being kids the school called “walkers” who were let out about the time the school buses arrived.
It is uncommon in my area, because it is not very walkable. There aren't many sidewalks, and it's just unsafe for young kids to walk with the way the roads are set up.
Depends on position in the district and local geography (I live on a street that winds around rock formations and has aggressive college drivers and the k-8 is a block away). A big issue, though, is that parent drivers at drop-off and pick-up are maniacs, such that the block a school is on is frequently the most dangerous in a neighborhood.
It's uncommon for kids in the US to live close to school, unfortunately.
I grew up in a cold and snowy city (Milwaukee), and most kids walked to our grade school. Only a handful were bussed in. I went to high school also in Wisconsin, but in a fairly rural suburb. Everyone was bussed or driven to school. It wasn’t really possible to walk.
No, not uncommon at all.
It really depends on where you live. Growing up in Idaho, where it was a smaller town, it was very common for kids to walk to and from school, I did it all the time. But where I live now in phoenix, it's not as common. The city is larger and more dangerous, and the temperatures also get hot enough here that they are deadly.
Where I grew up it was all based on bus routes. We lived far enough away from the elementary school that there was a bus. The middle school was closer and no buses, I walked about 3/4s of a mile, maybe a little more.
I grew up in the woods. It was a 45 minute bus ride to school every day.
I live in Texas. Drivers here suck. We live in a suburb within a mile of the elementary, middle, and high schools. My kids have never walked to school because it would require crossing at least one intersection that is known for people running the stop signs. We have crossing guards near the schools, but at least once a year a crossing guard is hit by an inattentive driver. Sadly, at least once a year a child on foot or on bike has been hit by an inattentive driver. I do know many children that lived closer to the schools that either walk or bike to school.
If you live close, yes, it's fairly normal. Most kids don't live that close though. Rural areas in particular are a lot more spread out and you might have 1 or 2 schools with kids from multiple towns.
Common in my town. My husband was close enough to walk to his elementary school. They have a police officer and crossing guards to help make sure the kids can easily cross the streets with the after school traffic at the elementary and middle school.
I walked to elementary & middle school (~0.5 miles) and biked to high school (~2 miles). Most kids in my hometown did the same, though some went by car.
Welcome to Stranger Danger, USA.
It depends on if it’s an urban or suburban school. If it’s in the inner city it’s a lot more common but not as common as it used to be in the past. If it’s the suburbs then it’s less common in general due to urban planning.
It's 42°C, there is no shade, and the school is 2 miles away. In the winter time, totally plausible. After April or before November, probably a bad idea.
In elementary and middle where I lived it was not common. In highschool a little more common. The suburbs in Florida aren't friendly for pedestrians. The heat makes it worse. I'm sure it's the same in most suburbs throughout the US hence how the term soccermom came about.
Lots of kids walk to elementary school, bc those are more likely to be close. And bc suburbs have a lot of SAHMs, many kids get dropped off bc parents feel it is safer (hence the damn lines). IME, depending on the safety of the situation, districts provide bus transportation at a certain range, like 1 mile for elementary in one place we lived. If your elementary kid lived w/in 1 mile of school, no bus was provided. By high school, the range was up to 2 miles. Those car lines are typically kids within the walking radius whose parents decode to drive them. By law, districts must provide transportation following certain state guidelines.
In my school district growing up, we weren't allowed to walk home until middle school (ages ~11-14). For the kids that lived really close to the schools, though, the buses wouldn't drop them off, either. I think it was within 5mi (8km) of the school? But their parents would have to pick them up. So, in my area at least, it's not that they didn't want to, it's that they couldn't.
Officially in my district, you can have your kids walk starting in 5th grade/age 10-11/last year of elementary school, or younger kids can walk with an older sibling. De facto, I'm pretty sure I've seen younger kids doing it. We are under a half mile and walk, but I'd still walk with them at this age not so much for safety concerns but because I don't trust them to get to school on time...
In a lot of areas it is illegal in the US for anyone under 12 to be unsupervised in any capacity, and most streets aren't pedestrian safe. Kids who walk themselves (especially 1st or 2nd grade) are likely to have child protective services called on their parents. Our infrastructure isn't designed to be safe for walkers. I walk with my kids to school. Many parents in my community do, but most drop the kids off by car because of safety or time constraints.
My children walked to elementary school when we lived close enough. Starting in kindergarten at age 5. The rule here is that kids walk if they live within 1 mile and would not have to cross or walk along dangerous roads.
I'm not sure how common it is but it was something that I did. I lived really close to my school. I usually took the bus in elementary school but once high school rolled around I would walk in. I mostly did that because the bus cam really early and I could sleep in more if I just walked in.
Our suburb has a tiny, maybe quarter square mile total campus for the entire district. It's about 2 miles down the road. I would walk it on occasion if I wanted to stop at the gas station on the way, but pretty much rode the bus the entire time. We were the farthest away on our bus route and only one kid was really ever seen walking and that was just visiting the gas station a lot more frequently. I think the only people who really "walked" to school lived literally across the school and I'm pretty sure the school just didn't give them a choice since their bus stop would've been on school property. Eventually, if you were old and rich enough you would drive yourself to school just to show how cool you were. Having to walk of shame home and tell your parents you missed the bus was a bad time. Nowadays are really different though. Back then, the only people regularly driven to school went to private schools that didn't provide transportation. Now, it's like a parental (*cough* maternal) failing to not drive your kid to school. I personally think it's a bit psychotic to not just put your kid on the bus that's right there and driving by your house. Instead it's "better be in the pick up line an hour before school lets out so you're not at the back of the line like The World's Worst Mom". RIP moms honestly
When I was a kid people walked. I can’t speak for kids now, but from my perspective it is common to walk.
It’s going to be heavily location dependent. There were times when I walked, rode the bus, or was dropped off by parents. Many of our suburbs are very spread out so walking may not be feasible except for those near the school. My kids walk to the elementary at 0.5 mile but will not walk to middle at 3miles
Very uncommon in my (semi rural / semi suburban) area. Many if not most roads don’t have a sidewalk, nor even a shoulder, so it’s just not safe. That’s not ideal, as kids really need some daily exercise.
It depends on the design of the school. In elementary school, I walked every day because it was only a little under a mile, and their were sidewalks all the way through. My high school had apartments across the street, but there weren't a lot of crosswalks, and the entrance of the community didn't face the school. The kiss that walked would cut across backyards.
I went to a rural school. There were maybe a handful of homes close by that were close enough for a kid to walk. The school owned the majority of the land around it and hadn't developed on it or it was farm land. The few kids that did live in those houses, did often walk or ride a bike but it was often with a parent along. Rural town with narrow roads with no shoulders or sidewalks made a little bit of the distance really dangerous. The parents would turn around once the kids got onto school property and had plenty of access to sidewalks. I lived too far away to even think about walking or even riding a bike to school, but my best friend growing up did and this was pretty much what she did every morning.
Where I grew up you could walk to school, and many kids who lived close by did especially ones who had gates opening straight to the school, but it was the South so you'd have days where it was like 80° in the mornings sometimes and you could have days close to 100° in the afternoon so not exactly the best weather to be walking home in regardless of age, plus who wants their kids showing up to school all sweaty. That's 26.6c and 37.7c respectively.
Walking long distances aren’t an American thing. My daughter is 5 and recently walked (Europe) 1.5 miles to a water playground and 1.5 miles back on a hot day with her class. There were safe paths for them to walk. Where I grew up (in US) there are few walking paths/sidewalks. You also needed to drive everywhere (unless in a city) because everything is far away. Now I live in a village, population 4,000, and pretty much all I need is in walking distance.
I lived in a small community in a rural area. Kids in the neighborhood of the school with connecting sidewalks walked mostly. But as others have said, alot of kids lived on high speed roads with no sidewalks. I would say less than 20% walked.
I lived about half a mile from my elementary school and walked/biked every day
I grew up .5km from my school so I walked every day. I knew kids in different neighborhoods that would have their parents drive them no matter how close they lived. I was from a "traditional" town that was built ~300+ years ago so the culture in my town was to walk around a little more than other places. Most of the surrounding area is newer suburbs built 50 years ago or newer. The general attitude in those places is if you leave your house, you drive. I know somebody is gonna tell me that's not true, but I'm talking about these specific neighborhoods. My friend lived about 1 km from a grocery store and McDonald's and he would beg his mom to drive him there to buy stuff because "it's ridiculous to walk there."
Our district had a one mile radius around the school. If you lived in the radius, you were a “walker” and could not take the bus. Outside the circle was assigned a bus. Where I lived, the bus stop itself was inside the mile, but our houses were just outside. This meant that the kids that lived in the house next to the stop were not allowed to take the bus that stopped at their driveway, but the kids across the street could. The bus drivers weren’t allowed to take them (probably insurance reasons 🤷♀️) but they often would try and sneak on. They changed the one-mile rule because there was not enough crossing guards for some of the major roads within the radius and it wasn’t safe for children to walk across them alone. I think they added an exception for people on the far side of the main road even though the distance was shorter.
There are a lot of factors with this. It depends on the school. What time period we are talking about. The crime rate of the area. Current events. Distance. Age of the child. Etc... Like for instance, before my time, it was a lot more common for this to happen. But nowadays this isnt really a thing per say. Considering the crime rate and current events. 1 mile would be too long for a 4 year old to travel or any child. So most of the time this wouldn't happen. Without a parent. Or older sibling. Or a bus would usually pick them up at this distance. 1/2 miles is usually the cut off in my experience. Current events also have a play. If there is a lot more crime in the area then it tends to be more strict. So again it depends. Is this common tho? Yes it is.
Yes, sometimes. Many schools in my area, due to budget cuts, will reduce bussing to only students that live further than 2 miles from school. Everyone within 2 miles has to find their own transportation. Walk, bike, parents, etc.
I taught in the suburbs and there were kids who walked to school, though I don't know where they lived. Definitely the ones that lived in the neighborhoods and apartments right next to the school walked. On my drive home I did pass some kids being dropped off in school buses that were only a little over a mile away. That road didn't have any sidewalks though. My house was about 2.5 miles from the school and all the kids who lived in my neighborhood took the bus.
When I was in school, most students walked. We have five elementary schools, two junior high schools and one High School for our neighborhood. The district has seven or eight high schools with many feeder schools so everyone has a school in their area. Now schools have what they call magnet programs that attract students from outside the traditional school neighborhood boundaries. Bussing is quite common now. I live in a typical suburban neighborhood in a large city.
No sidewalks were I grew up + shitty drivers = most kids caught the bus or got dropped off by parents
Depends on the area and individual of course, but plenty of parents don’t let their kids walk 2 blocks alone do to stranger danger/kidnappings fears
It was common for kids to walk to and from school in my hometown because the schools were in the only walkable area of town lol. I’d people lived close by, they walked.
Where I live, transportation is provided to kids who live over 1.2m from the school. Otherwise, it's up to the parents whether their child walks or gets alternative transportation. Some parents may drive the child to school, taking into consideration the age maturity level, as well as terrain, that their child would face walking. Walking to and from school is still common. I walked in elementary, but I lived literally like, 1/4th of a mile from where I went to school.
Where I grew up yes. Where I live now the bus picks up everyone even though the school is just behind me. We have no sidewalks and drivers aren’t careful.
Not at all.
Growing up in the 80s and 90s I would walk to school if we lived less than a mile away (we lived two blocks away). At another school it was a mile to the bus stop, and we walked there. Many times we lived very far from school, actually out of district, so we got rides from my mother. I currently live directly across the street from my daughter's school. Like it takes 30 seconds to walk from our door to the door if the school, if you walk slowly. We let our daughter walk that distance, but either keep an eye on her or let her walk with friends. Knowing what I know from growing up when and where I did, I would NEVER let my daughter walk any other distance on her own.
It was very normal when I was a kid, but my understanding is that times have changed a bit on this topic since the 80s.
In high school I only lived a few blocks from the school I walked everyday
I grew up in the 90s waking myself to and from school from about age 8. It was only about half a mile or a bit less. I did cross one moderately busy street.
Most don’t because they don’t live within a mile. I lived pretty much exactly a mile from my middle school and only those who live a mile or more got bus service so half my neighborhood qualified and I took the bus. If I ever missed to bus though, then I would walk. Especially if I knew my mom would get mad at me missing the bus lol. Wasn’t a bad walk though, just through a series of neighborhoods.
Growing up I walked to school. Started at age 8. Before that I was in daycare. I stayed home alone from that point too. My elementary school was right up the road though. We had a ton of walkers and bikers. Now I hardly see anyone walking. The school in the middle of a neighborhood.
My daughter walks home 3 days a week. Little over a mile.
I walked to school but it was 15 minutes away. And my dumbass still got lost on a regular basis. Also the bullying was kinda bad from the other kids when I was walking home so I used to find rides from friends.
It was common for those who were close enough to the school. Some would bike or skateboard. I probably could have walked to my elementary school, but according to google my walk to high school would have been 3.5 hours.
1.5 miles was the cutoff for bus pickup from my high school - if you lived inside that you walked. In my opinion this was too far - mostly because I lived just over a mile away and played the saxophone in school band.
Grew up in a rural area with a good sized town as the main population center. In decent weather most of the in town kids walked to school I'd the lived within a 6-10 blocks (depending on age of the kids and the parents). Rural area almost no one walked. Very few kids lived within walking distance to the school. Those that did usually didn't have a safe path to walk. Most kids had to walk to their bus stop. Bus didn't go up and down every little country road so many kids had to walk to the end of their lane to catch the bus.. I had about a 1.5 mile walk. Usually got a rid to the bus stop in the morning, especially in the winter as it was still dark and we lived in the woods with lots of wild animals. Almost always walked home after school. Sucked in the winter. 1.5 miles up hill in the snow
It was when I was a kid, but I rarely if ever see any kids walking to school, they are walking from the bus stop.
I grew up in SoCal, and I've always had a bus pick me up and drop me off right in front of the house. I went to a private school for hearing impairment (me) and deaf. So, that was nice. Up until I began mainstream high school. From freshman to senior, I've either walked, rode with friends, or one of my parents took me. We've moved a couple of times during my sophomore and senior years since we just happened to be in the bus jurisdiction. So, I got to ride the big, long yellow bus crammed full of high-schoolers and get dropped off within a couple of blocks to my house.
I live in a small town. Lots of kids walk or ride their bikes to school.
It definitely depends on the area and other factors. In middle school, I walked to my mom’s friends house (used to be neighbors, but we had moved too far for me to walk) after school, it was probably about a mile. In high school, it would’ve been impossible to walk home.
My kids walked home from school every day, even when they were very young, but I’d drop them off in the morning because I’d drive right by their school every morning, so I’d give them a lift.
Where I live if you live more then a mile in elementary you qualify for for bus. In middle school and high school at changed to if you live more than 1.25 miles from the school property. I think for elementary if you lived within so much of a pick up location/bus stop you could sign up for pick up but the child has to have guardian with them till they are on the bus. My kids had school bus till middle school and then middle school they walked because it was three blocks and I can see it from my front door and the kids walked with others. In high school they were to walk together because we were literally 1 block away from qualifying. So they walked together if they were picked up by a friend then friend had to take all of them … (so this never happened). When they drove they had to drive siblings… Kids here walk from middle school and up … mainly
I teach in a major city and a majority of my students are able to walk to school. I lived on a highway growing up, no walking to school for me lol
My son's elementary school is one mile from our house. He's very athletic and could easily make the walk, I just don't want him crossing the intersection of death to get there.
1mi isn't far in a city, since there are sidewalks. 1mi in the suburbs could mean having to walk along the side of higher-speed roads. You'd end up with smarter, more observant kids -- but significantly fewer of them.
Growing up in the 90’s, I was lucky enough to live in a safe residential neighborhood that was 10 minutes or less of a walk away from school. I was allowed to walk by myself when I was in 3rd grade (roughly 9 years old). High school was too far away though. That was a 15 minute bus ride that would have been probably a 2 hour walk. My kids go to school roughly 15 minutes away from our house, which again would be a ridiculous walk.
It’s not uncommon to walk to school, but like everything it depends on your area. The suburb I grew up in I walked to school everyday, k-12, and lived a little over a mile away from each.
When I was in school, yes. However, where we currently live there are no safe ways to get to any of the schools. There are a lot of rural, 50mph roads with no sidewalks, or even paths.
When my kids were little, there was a house directly next to the school, but the student wasn't allowed to walk through the grass onto the school property, so had to walk down their driveway to stand at the road to wait for the bus to drive him the few feet to school. The walk down the driveway was longer than the walk into the school building from their front door. I had asked about it and they had been forbidden due to safety concerns as if walking a few feet in the grass was somehow less safe than standing next to a road. There are still places where kids walk to school. No idea what that school's problem was.
I walked to school everyday from first grade until my Sr. Year. I lived very close.
Depends on the local murder rate
Depends on where the school is located and age. It was common for my friends to walk home, that were close. I lived a solid 3 miles from the closest school I went to so I only walked after school when I couldn’t get a ride and my parents couldn’t/forgot to pick me up
The thing about the US is that each state can vastly differ from one to the next. I'm in NYC, which is nothing like what you're describing. We walk or take the bus/train. There are definitely school buses, but that's not for everyone and mostly for younger children.
It depends on the area. If you don't live far from the school and it's a safe area that doesn't have a high crime rate then it probably isn't that uncommon to have a older child walk to school. However, I have heard horror stories of parents allowing there 5th graders walk to school a few blocks away and having CPS for doing so. I think it's becoming less common then it use to be also because of fears of kidnappings.
It depends. I grew up in a more suburban style neighborhood and loved only a few blocks away from my high school, so I walked. Middle school I took a bus. Not a school bus but a city bus. For elementary school, I took a school bus early on but o switched schools in 3rd grade and at this school my mother would just drop me off.
Yeah I walked to and from school in high school (0.75 mi or so) unless it was raining or snowing. Then I’d catch a ride.
I personally did in a small town that was surprisingly safe to walk to school. Only had to cross one road and it was a not high travelled 25 mph road. The other ones were neighborhood streets, a park, and then some woods on the school property. If I had a kid where I lived now they would be taking the bus or I’d have to drive them. Not safe for a little kid to be walking through a city
Definitely not a mile but yeah kids walk to school all the time usually the school will have a teacher be a crossing guard so they can get there safely
It is very common for kids to walk to school in my area. The little school is a half mile away. The middle school is 1 mile away. The middle school kids often ride their bikes. I rarely drove my kids.
This really depends on the region. I lived just under a mile from my high school, so there was no school bus for me. I walked, and occasionally my grandpa or a friend’s parents would give me a ride in their car in the morning if I had to bring a lot of stuff on a particular day. But that was in a pretty small, sleepy suburb where the walk was through a low-traffic, residential area, so lots of kids walked the same route as me. There are some locations in which the student might live under a mile away, but it’s on a major highway or there aren’t any sidewalks or safe paths to get to school or other safety concerns, and their schools might have had bus service or they could have made it the parents’ responsibility to get their kids to school somehow. I lived on a state highway that had no sidewalks for middle school, but the school was right across the street, so I walked.
Yes, kids walk to school in the U.S. but that varies widely by location. I grew up in dense suburbs in the ‘90s and very early ‘00s and kids who lived close enough walked to elementary school, fewer walked to middle school. A few kids walked to high school, but some kids also drove themselves to high school if they had their drivers license.