Are Minnesota districts facing uphill push to get more kids to walk to school?

A flood of kids spilled out of a school bus that stopped near the Witch's Hat water tower in Minneapolis' Prospect Park neighborhood.

"We get to walk?" one student asked excitedly, bounding off the bus.

D.Jay Gjerde, who coordinates Pratt Elementary's Walk to School Day, offered high-fives and corralled the kids to walk the last few blocks to the school.

"They light up when they realize they're not going straight to the school," Gjerde said.

Getting to class on foot is a novelty for most students these days. But many Minnesota schools are pushing more kids to walk or bike, in hopes of introducing physical activity, easing pressure on transportation budgets and reducing congestion in drop-off zones.

Cities and schools have spent tens of millions of dollars through federal and state grants to add sidewalks, install flashing lights at crosswalks and set up chaperoned "walking school bus" routes to address unsafe roads, which parents cite over and over as their main concern for walking kids.

"A lot of people assume it's, 'Oh, it takes too long,' 'We live too far,' or 'Minnesota is cold,'" said Kelly Corbin, the Minnesota Department of Transportation's Safe Routes to School coordinator. "The big concerns are actually our built environment, our infrastructure that we have, that is a determining factor for students wanting to walk and parents or caregivers allowing them to walk."

Older generations like to joke they walked to school, uphill both ways. The walking part, at least, is mostly true.

The grandparents of today's schoolkids walked to school as often as not. According to data from the Safe Routes to School National Partnership, half of U.S. students walked to school in the 1960s.

Today, that figure is less than 15%.

There are many reasons for that decline. In the core cities, there are fewer kids. In sprawling suburbs, more kids live farther away from school.

And the kids living in cities are spread across fewer households, said Evan Roberts, a Pratt Elementary parent and University of Minnesota assistant professor who studies demographics.

Take Minneapolis' Longfellow neighborhood.

"During the height of the baby boom, those areas had a lot of families," said Roberts, who helped organize Pratt's Walk to School Day and walked with a group of children from his neighborhood nearby. "There's obviously still a lot of a lot of housing down there, but the population of children has declined."

Factors go beyond demographic changes, too. Many school districts offer magnet programs that attract students from a larger area, and Minnesota's open enrollment system means many kids attend schools miles from home. Plus, families are busy, and worry about crime and dangerous drivers not paying attention to kids on foot.

Walking benefits kids and districts

Congress in 2005 created the national Safe Routes to School program, which supports infrastructure and education programs aimed at getting more kids walking. Since then, Minnesota's Safe Routes to School program has funneled more than $66 million to districts and local governments across the state to pay for education and physical improvements.

In 2023, the Legislature passed a law requiring Minnesota schools to teach kindergarten through eighth graders about walking and biking to school at the beginning of each school year.

Walking has benefits for kids, Corbin said. Whether they get to school that way or take a lap around the building before classes begin, getting morning exercise helps activate kids' brains.

"When they get to their classroom, they're awake, they got their wiggles out, they chatted with their friends, and they're ready to tune into their teachers," she said.

It also reduces congestion around schools, helps kids build independence and alleviates pressure on parents to drive. And while not all kids can get to school that way, learning how to walk and bike safely helps when they walk to a friend's house or a store, Corbin said.

The Bloomington school district considers about 85% of students bus-eligible, including elementary students who live farther than a half-mile from school and secondary students more than 1.25 miles from school, said Rick Kaufman, the district's executive director of community relations and emergency management.

The district has its own bus drivers but has leaned on contract bus services as it struggled to hire drivers to handle all its routes. But rotating contract bus drivers often don't know the routes, leading to pickup delays, Kaufman said. Busing has become costly and frustrating, and some parents have resorted to driving their kids, increasing traffic around schools.

Kaufman said he thinks some parents are hanging on to pandemic habits.

"They didn't want their kids on packed school buses," he said. "For others, it's easier because they're working from home."

Now the district is among the those considering extending that walking zone. In Bloomington, a proposal would add a quarter-mile for both elementary and secondary schools; those discussions started amid the need to cut $5 million from next school year's budget. That change would nearly double the number of elementary-age kids in the walk zone, to more than 900, and increase the number of secondary-school kids in the walk zone from 1,500 to 1,900, Kaufman said. Hopkins area schools are discussing increasing the walk zone to 2 miles amid rising transportation costs.

Kaufman said many parents want their kids to walk to school and offer suggestions to make it safer. For instance, the district recently worked with the city to improve crossings around Oak Grove elementary and middle schools with better signage and lights that flash before drivers even approach crosswalks.

Kaufman said the district also works closely with Bloomington police, and officers patrol areas around schools and bus stops before and after school hours to keep an eye on students.

Traffic and road design

In discussions with families, teachers and kids, St. Paul Safe Routes to School Lead Sarah Stewart said cars are the biggest concern.

"Consistently, the speed of traffic and safety of intersections are the biggest barriers across the board," she said. "In some neighborhoods, crime concern is a barrier."

At Bruce Vento Elementary on St. Paul's East Side, the district is piloting what is known as a "walking school bus": kids walk to "stops" and an adult walks the route, picking kids up as they go on their way to school.

Other schools in the district such as Randolph Heights have similar, longstanding informal "walk lines."

St. Paul school officials also meet regularly with city officials to discuss ways to improve safety. That can mean extending curbs so kids trying to cross a street aren't hidden by parked cars; adding medians to slow traffic; adding bike lanes, and, in some cases, sidewalks.

In Richfield, about 20% of students walk or bike to school at least some of the time, said Timothy Brackett, the district's Safe Routes to School coordinator.

Sidewalks — or lack of them — are one of the biggest problems, something the district has worked with the city to address.

The city just added a stretch of sidewalk around Richfield's Dual Language and STEM campuses that facilitates walking and also eases some of the drop-off congestion, because parents can drop students off along the new sidewalk, Brackett said.

"It's making it safer because there are less pedestrian-vehicle interactions," he said.