Are you amazed that more elementary school kids don't get hit by cars during the crazy drop-off and pick-up madness?

The school my kids attend does a wonderful job at traffic control. They have teachers/paras at every cross walk and the principal stands in front guiding all the cars through the parking lot. My kids cross the street to my car at pick up time, but they always use the cross walk and are always escorted by an adult and student members of the safety patrol. Here at least, it seems to be up to the administrators to implement a safety program that works and, well keeps kids safe. At our school at least they have done a great job of it.

Where I lived most pupils came by bus or walked and there were crossing guards who stopped the traffic for the kids to cross the roads.

@SuperMouse See…we don’t have that…....do you live in a bigger city by chance?

Our school is much like @SuperMouse.‘s We have two crossing guards and a police officer in the parking lot in the morning and in the afternoon. We live in a small town of 3000 people. We still have idiots that don’t pay attention to the speed limit or crossing guards occasionally, but the police are always right on their tail.

Just this past fall I was walking home with my daughter, and as we were crossing the street with the crossing guard a lady drove right through the intersection. The crossing guard yelled at her and she slowed down once she went through the intersection. She said she was “so sorry”, she didn’t notice. If my daughter hadn’t been holding my hand and decided to run across the street, she would have been hit.

No. I think more kids should be required (by schools and parents alike) to walk to and from school.

Walking isn’t so dangerous, even in so-called “dangerous neighborhoods”. It really isn’t.

I’m just amazed there are so many kids getting picked up and dropped off from the bus stops much less the school.

And they wonder why we have so many fat kids. There were no fat kids in my elementary school. Maybe it’s because we weren’t chauffeured around all the time like a frickin’ rock star. We walked to school, and carried our own textbooks – there was none of this “one textbook per five kids” crap going on.

Around here there is at least one officer, there’s a $500 fine for using a cell phone in a school zone, and it’s still scary to pick up or drop off the kids.

My kids take the bus to school, but on the rare days when I drive them or pick them up, the traffic is well-regulated. There are specific areas for drop-off, where you pull up to let your child out of the car right next to the sidewalk and a teacher is there to keep an eye on everything. It’s in a separate location from the driveway where the buses pull up to drop off children.

For pick-up, the parents park in a specific area away from the bus lanes. You then have to go to a side door, sign your child out, and walk your child to the car. I haven’t seen any problems with the system here.

There’s a really interesting book called “Free Range Kids” where the author talks about how kids don’t walk or bike to school nearly as often as they used to. She quotes a statistic that half of children who are hit by cars while walking to school are hit by parents driving a child to school. She concludes that if parents didn’t drive their kids but let them walk or ride the bus, the rate of children being hit by cars would drop by 50%. I don’t have the book on hand so can’t look up where she got that information, but her sources seemed very credible. It’s a great book that I think all parents should read.

@CyanoticWasp I would be happy to let my kids walk to school, but the walk would simply be too far to be at all practical. The schools here strongly encourage parents to have their kids take the bus. Once my kids hit 7th grade, they’ll be able to walk to school and, thanks to the convenient location of our house, I’ll even be able to watch them go from our door to the school’s door. Heck, I’ll even be able to embarrass them by yelling out the back door, “Stop dawdling and get to school! Don’t talk to that older boy! Hey, I know you can hear me! Look before you cross the street! Look both ways! Stop running! Why are you running???” So much to look forward to in life…

@Seek_Kolinahr It amazes me too. I live less than a half mile from the grade school and walk with my daughter when there is no snow or ice on the ground. Many parents pass us by with their children on beautiful days, some live closer to the school than us. One lives across the street and three houses down from the school. Unbelievable!

@MissAusten
7th grade? I was walking to school from the beginning and I wasn’t abducted that often.

Yes. I am amazed.

@ragingloli I walked to school from kindergarten through most of sixth grade, until we moved and were too far from the school for walking. My kids don’t ride the bus because of fears of abduction, they ride the bus because we live too far from the grade school and lower middle school for them to reasonably be expected to walk. The upper middle school and high school are within walking distance, and upper middle school starts with seventh grade. It’s a distance thing, not a fear thing.

@CyanoticWasp I agree with you, but walking to school wasn’t the issue. It was the lack of regulation of the motor vehicle activity around the schools. I think I’ll write a letter.

You’ll like this. I ran a daycare. The school the kids went to was around the corner and block down. They walked. I cared for my neighbor’s kids. K. So, it snowed. My neighbor called and insisted that I pick the kids up, and not let/make them walk in the snow. So, I have to load up 6 preschool kids and infants to drive one block.

When my neighbor picked up her kids and took them home, within 10 minutes they were outside playing in the snow…...

No. Our schools are very organized with this and there is little room for accident.

We’re lucky, our city used to make a great deal of money handing out tickets around schools, so people are especially careful now. There are police randomly placed at different schools every day, and parent volunteers also can be found at every school.

@Val123 I did like that. But “walking to school” is part of the issue, because it’s understandable that kids who live miles from school would have “a ride”, whether that’s in a bus or from a parent or neighbor. But when all kids get a ride, even from within a six-block radius of a neighborhood school on a quiet two-lane residential road, well… the road wasn’t designed to handle that much traffic at peak hours day after day. So snarls and blockages ensue, and impatient people (late for work after dropping off the kids) make the problems that are mentioned in the thread above. In fact, those impatient people make for the question in the first place. If more kids were walking, there would be “no issue”.

@CyanoticWasp I see what you’re saying.

@Val123 I love when that happens. Thanks.