October is International Walk to School Month, which usually coincides with commentary shaming overprotective parents for driving their little darlings to school. You’re not going to get that here.

It’s annoying to see SUVs lining the streets in front of schools at drop-off and pick-up times, causing traffic congestion and burning toxic fossil fuels. Surely, the littles can walk to school like we did in the good old days, right?

We know walking is great for the body and soul, is free and nonpolluting, and doesn’t congest roads. Kids need to get off their screens and move, and walking to and from school is a great start.

So why don’t more kids walk or bike to school these days?

When I was a kid, I developed strong reflexes by sprinting across Southwest Marine Drive, to get from our home in Musqueam Park to Southlands elementary on Camosun Street, on Vancouver’s West Side. It could be tricky, with the morning traffic to UBC and the lack of crosswalks or sidewalks. When you’re the fifth kid in your family, as I was, it’s a matter of survival of the fastest. On the plus side, starting the day with a sprint through speeding cars made sure I was wide awake and alert when I got to school.

I don’t recommend that approach, despite having survived it, miraculously. You might think that experience would make me a walk-to-school diehard, with little patience for pampered progeny getting chauffeured to and from class. Nah.

Those were very different days, and not only because there were lots of spare heirs in most families. Every kid in my neighourhood went to the local public school, or a handful of nearby private schools. I never heard of anyone going “cross boundary” to a public school outside their home catchment area.

There may have been a few fledgling alternative schools, but there wasn’t much in the way of boutique, choice options like French immersion, international baccalaureate, Montessori, fine arts, or mini schools.

You just went to the closest school, and in most cases, you walked or rode your bike, even if that required sprinting across highways. We even walked home for lunch a lot of the time.

When our kids started school around the turn of the millennium, I assumed most kids on our block would be heading to the local school. I assumed wrong. The kids next door went to a Catholic school, the ones on the other side of them went to a private school for girls, a couple went over to Jules Quesnel for French immersion, one went to an alternative school in Richmond, another went to a private school for students with special needs at UBC, and so on. Most got rides to school from Mom or Dad.

When I served as a trustee on the Vancouver School Board (VSB), we found increasing numbers of parents were registering for kindergarten choice programs outside their catchment area each year. The last time I checked, over a third were trying to get into schools or programs outside their communities. The numbers were even larger for high school students.

We also found that parents of younger kids would look for schools with before-and-after-school care availability, and we willing to drive a distance to get it.

In Vancouver, there are many parents who’d love to be able to have their kids walk to their local school, but there either isn’t one, as in the case of the Olympic Village or the River District (in southeast Vancouver), or their school is oversubscribed and they didn’t win the entry lottery and have to travel to a school outside their catchment area.

Lots of kids these days are raised in joint-custody families, where one parent lives outside their school catchment area. That may mean that half the time they can walk or bike, while the rest of the time they are driven. There was even an absurd case in Vancouver in which the Ministry of Children and Family Development investigated a father for letting his kids take the bus to school, on the days they spent with him.

It’s not easy being an urban parent. You get shamed for being over-protective, or you get blamed for letting your kids doing something incredibly safe, like walking to school or riding public transit.

When my kids were little, we had the flexibility to be home when we wanted to be and we could walk the kids to our local school, but most parents have to get to work in the morning and it makes more sense to drop their kids off on the way.

Some days I had one sick kid and one who needed to get to school, and it was easier to put them both in the car, when they were too young to walk alone.

I was part of the problem at times, and that problem—too many parents driving kids to school—needs to be addressed. But fixing it is a political issue, not a parent-shaming issue.

Blame government, not parents

I still blame the B.C. Liberals for much of what ails us, including—at least in part—the high number of parents who drive their kids to school. The Liberals’ 2002 “school choice” policy change, which enabled parents to enroll their kids in any public school they wanted to as long as space is available, led to a spike in school shopping and more kids travelling out of their catchment areas for school. 

That was when Christy Clark was the education minister, and coincided with growing government pressure on schools to compete for students by increasing specialty choice programs.

Choice sounds like a positive thing, but it has it downsides, including increased traffic as families shuttle their kids to French immersion, Mandarin bilingual, Montessori, international baccalaureate, hockey academy, and mini-school programs.

Having a seismically safe, vibrant, well-resourced school with before-and-after-school care in every community is key to making it easier for younger kids to walk or bike to school, with or without their parents. It’s also important to have safe walking and biking infrastructure, including sidewalks, well-marked crosswalks, and separated bike lanes. Schools also need secure bike storage for students and staff.

That means funding and building schools in the Olympic Village and River District, and completing seismic upgrades where they’re needed. It means improving our roads to make them safer for pedestrians and cyclists.

Schools need to be funded at a level that enables them to provide a rich range of course options, so families don’t feel compelled to travel to specialty programs or schools they perceive to be better than their local catchment school. That means enough funding to provide flexibility in course scheduling. That doesn’t exist now, and classes that aren’t in high demand don’t get offered, leaving students with fewer local options. 

Every elementary school needs to be able to offer before-and-after-school care, so busy, working parents don’t have to drive their kids across town to get a spot.

Making public transit free for school kids would also be an effective incentive for parents to let kids make their way to school by bus or SkyTrain. As it stands, it can be cheaper for parents to drop their kids at school while they’re on their way to work than it is to pay bus fare.

We’d all benefit from having more kids walk, bike, or bus to school through decreased traffic congestion and its associated emissions. Our streets would also be safer and kids would be healthier.

The solutions will come through public policy changes and funding for the right projects, not by blaming and shaming busy parents for how they get their kids to school.