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As D.C.’s school options improve, commutes are becoming more of a headache for families. Last week, thousands of D.C. families received the results of the MySchoolDC lottery, learning—after weeks of anxious anticipation—what their morning and afternoon commutes will look like next year. Transportation may not be the number one issue on parents’ minds as they make their choices— but perhaps it should be. Back in 1969, 48 percent of U.S. kids aged 5 to 14 usually got to school on their own steam—walking or riding a bike. These days, it’s more like 13 percent. Kids who get fresh air and exercise on their way to school arrive more ready to learn. Physical activity has been shown to improve attention span, classroom behavior, and academic achievement. Jennifer Hefferan, who runs the D.C. Department of Transportation’s Safe Routes to School program—the local chapter of a national effort to encourage active transportation— says when she started the job, the evidence of the benefits of physical activity was merely anecdotal. “You’d hear principals saying, ‘I love Walk to School Day because I don’t see kids in my principal’s office,’” she says. “Now there’s actual research supporting that.” Spanish researchers found that a walk to school of more than 15 minutes improved cognitive function, especially in girls. They noted that the plasticity of the brain during adolescence makes it an especially important time to stimulate cognitive function. Walking and biking can also help stem the childhood obesity epidemic and reduce the incidence of diabetes. The benefits don’t just accrue to kids, either. Nationally, 10 to 14 percent of morning rush hour traffic is attributable to school drop-offs, making everyone’s morning commute more hectic. Double-parking, chaotic merging, sudden U-turns, and blocked crosswalks outside of schools create hazardous conditions (and further discourage parents from letting their kids walk). Few District schools have parking facilities available for parents doing dropoff and pickup. Plus, any family that finds itself criss-crossing the city every morning and evening knows
Darrow Montgomery/File
By Tanya Snyder
Walking Blues: Most elementary-age kids live within walking distance to their in-boundary school, but many attend class elsewhere. how grueling travel routines eat up valuable hours of family time. “[My husband] Danny and I, every night, have to think about the next day,” says Alys Willman, whose two sons go to the Latin American Montessori Bilingual Public Charter School—but on two different campuses. “We have two kids who get out of school within 15 minutes of each other on opposite sides of the city, and they both have activities that they need to do, and everybody has to get home by 6. “And I’m usually sitting in a meeting in my office, texting different people just keeping track of where they are, making sure they got to where they’re supposed to go and that the bike attachment is where it needs to be and that the car is where it needs to be,” says Willman, who lives in Petworth and works downtown. “It’s a lot of mental energy.” Last spring, city leaders rejected a proposal to implement a citywide high school lottery without geographic preference. But that’s still the way it works for the 44 percent of the District’s schoolkids who attend charter schools, which are forbidden from expressing any preference for children who live nearby. (Charter school enrollment is around six percent nationally.)
A 2014 study by the 21st Century School Fund, a local nonprofit that works to improve D.C. public school facilities, found that although the vast majority of D.C. elementary school students lived within about a halfmile of a DCPS elementary school during the 2012-13 school year, these students traveled an average of about a mile to school every day. Only about 25 percent of D.C. students go to their in-boundary school. A mile is a long walk for a young child, but it might be doable for older kids. Unfortunately, the average distance grows to about a mile and a half for DCPS middle school students, while high schoolers commute on average more than two miles. Charter school students travel even farther. Most schools require the youngest kids to be accompanied to their classroom in the morning by a responsible adult, and the recent investigation of a Silver Spring couple for child neglect has everyone on guard about the oncenormal practice of having older kids accompany younger ones. That means that parents who want their kids to walk to school have to fit that walk into their own morning routine, before getting themselves to work on time.
For many, it’s more than they can manage. The constant shuffle of charter school sites makes transportation even more challenging. Last summer, Shining Stars announced a move from 13th Street and Florida Avenue NW to Petworth, then to Wisconsin Avenue when that deal fell apart, and then finally to a Metro-inaccessible location near the Maryland border. And last month, just days before the lottery application was due, D.C. Bilingual Public Charter School announced it was moving from Columbia Heights to Fort Totten. Many charter schools that incubated in dense and transit-rich corners of Northwest D.C. have found permanent homes in less-populated areas, often in Northeast, leaving parents to figure out new, complicated commute patterns. The Center for Inspired Teaching still lists its address as 1436 U St. NW on the front page of its website, though it moved in the fall to 200 Douglas St. NE. That’s also when Mundo Verde moved from the heart of Columbia Heights to North Capitol and P streets and LAMB opened its new location four miles from its Missouri Avenue NW campus, which remains open. Willman biked her older son to the Missouri Avenue campus all winter last year, even through polar vortices, as long as the sidewalks weren’t too icy. But not now that he’s on the other campus. “It got complicated when they moved him across the city and there was no safe way to bike there,” she says. “We would bike him to school over there if there was a safe route.” Willman and her husband bought their house in Petworth to be close to LAMB, thinking that since the school owned the building on Missouri Avenue, it would never move. It’s not just out of environmental do-gooderism that she’d rather bike than drive. “It’s just much more pleasant,” Willman says. “There’s something about when we’d get in the car, and they’d get in the backseat, they would start fighting. They’d argue about what music we were going to play on the radio. There was a different dynamic in this enclosed space than if they were out there with their hair blowing in the wind.”
washingtoncitypaper.com april 3, 2015 7