Follow-Up to the “No Children Can Walk Home” Story from Magnolia, TX

At my old school this is how we handled it. A staggered dismissal the reason was more about the school being over capacity and the halls simply not able to handle all those kids going in 4 different directions. The times were official but honestly it was more wait until the group in front of you gets passed your pod (grade level groups of 4 classrooms) and then go.

2:45 Early Buses went to the gym (Drivers had to take roll the first week and once a month after that – federal or state funding grant)

2:50 Car riders went to the front of the school. Cars had name tags to speed up the process. Kids names were called and a number they stood on that spot car drove there, they jumped in and left. Parents were not allowed to park in the faculty lot and jump out and get their kids because they were running into each other and faculty cars.

We also had a special car lane outside the SPED Hall for Life Skills (Kids with cognitive disabilities who often have other medical problems so detailed information sometimes has to pass between parents and teachers) PCPD (Kids under 5 who have some type of disability that requires early intervention. It can be cognitive, but the class often also includes children who are deaf, blind, or have physical challenges that require early intervention, training (sign language, mobility PT OT, or training in Braille). Pegasus children of staff members ages 3 and 4 who are in the same class as the PCPD kids. They have an extended day 1 hour after contract time ends for teaching staff)

2:55 walkers left 2 groups per grade level one going east one going west out side doors that were past where the car riders and buses were driving and walked to the edge of the property were a crossing guard helped them across.

Late Buses stayed in a teacher’s room until their bus was called. They were given free time on computers/to talk/get homework done. We simply didn’t have enough drivers. We had a lot of bus riders because our school was one block away from a 4 lane 40 mph or higher road in 3 of the 4 directions. In Texas the state pays for transportation if the kids live more than 2 miles away or have to cross a road over 40 mph or divided road with more than 2 lanes) so my whole neighborhood gets transportation across the road.

BTW a tenth of a mile – given how most schools here are designed I’m guessing she lives maybe 2 houses down from the school.

When I was there kids didn’t ride bikes – because honestly they didn’t have them it was a very poor neighborhood. The school got a grant this fall and every K – 3rd grader who met an individually set reading goal got a brand new bike, helmet, and lock for the bike. Pretty much every single child got a bike.

“the Federal ‘Every Student Succeeds’ Free-Range Kids amendment that states parents have the right (barring local laws to the contrary) to choose how their kids get to and from school ”

STILL not what it says. It just says that the Every Student Succeeds act doesn’t /itself/ preclude any mode of transportation to school.

I just watched the video and while I agree that children who walk should be allowed to leave at dismissal, not be detained for 30 minutes as a punitive action to what should be a preferred mode of transportation, I also think the parents are using this Every Student Succeeds as their right to walk their child, not the child’s right to walk to school.

The moms who spoke are inserting their supervision rights to walk their kids, not the child can walk on their own.
Having law enforcement sent to parent’s homes to threaten them with trespassing is all levels of Texas crazy, but I also think this isn’t so much about the student’s right to walk to school, but the parents insisting they walk them there, which they should be able to walk them to the door, but this seems to be more about the parents than the kids now.

I looked up Bear Branch Elementary in Magnolia on Google maps. It is quite possibly the worst design for an elementary school I have ever seen. It is located on a very busy 5-lane highway. It backs up to a private, gated subdivision. There are no sidewalks, no marked pedestrian crosswalks, no traffic signals. There are big church campuses on either side of the school. It is terrible.

The school claims that they are just “delaying” the walkers until the cars clear. Why should they have to be delayed? It is probably only a hand full of students and I’m not sure how they would interfere with the car-lanes. Given the video, odds are that the drive through pick-up is a painful, tedious process that probably runs late a lot of the time.

The parents claim that the constable threatened them with arrest if they walk their kids home AT ALL.
It sounds like the school’s position is “do what you are told or else” with an accompanying dose of “don’t listen to those parents, they are just complaining because they don’t want to wait their turn”. It is a clever tactic: make your opponent sound selfish and crazy, while threatening them behind the scenes.

It is time to close this school, sell the land and start over.

“quotes the Federal “Every Student Succeeds” Free-Range Kids amendment that states parents have the right (barring local laws to the contrary) to choose how their kids get to and from school”

it STILL DOES NOT SAY THAT. It HAS NEVER SAID THAT. It will CONTINUE TO NOT SAY THAT into the forseeable future..

Other than that…
I’m sure the school district’s legal team is taking so long because they can’t find a way that this policy isn’t a civil rights violation.

Suburban schools are designed for SUV’s and Caravans and those who pay the highest school taxes.
It’s not about kids or families. It is about “getting the job done”

When did schools cease to be user friendly?
Time for a change.
Parents revolt! Your kids deserve better.

@James,

“I disagree; the problem is that schools are NOT designed for cars, but people insist on driving their kids to and from them anyway.

There are a couple of occasions when driving to school rather than walking is appropriate… science-fair day, school-play day (because costumes), days when it’s raining heavily enough to flood the streets. These are few and far between.”

I agree. If the school in my neighborhood was designed for cars, then the traffic at school pickup time would not completely clog our neighborhood.

@HD
“The kids going to the buses walked themselves to the buses in the back and everyone else either walked home or found their parent who was waiting outside.”

I went to three school districts in three states K-12 (one suburb and two small towns) and I don’t remember anyone who was regularly driven to school. Walking or the bus, or driving myself (as a HS senior).

The only time I was ever driven to or from school was when I had something like a doctor’s appointment during school hours.

“Suburban schools are designed for SUV’s and Caravans and those who pay the highest school taxes.
It’s not about kids or families. It is about “getting the job done.”

I think schools and townships are responsive to squeaky wheels. Parents who expect door-to-door service make quite a few phone calls as they are usually waiting in car lines. Creating an infrastructure around the school that has no sidewalks and is not pedestrian friendly and has a dismissal policy that penalizes pedestrians is the most moronic, short-sighted piece of flaming sh@t I’ve seen lately.

Why are the only options Drive-thru or Delivery? When did the students become deliverable goods and not citizens with rights to choose their best method of transportation, especially if they live two houses from the school!

I envision Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazzard harassing these parents and kids, sending out law enforcement Enis for *trespassing* at the kid’s elementary school. Good for these parents! Fight this for your kids, don’t just pull them out. Just because this school is on a highway doesn’t mean it can’t be made accessible for ALL students, especially by foot. What do they do for evacuations and emergencies if there are no sidewalks? How can a public school restrict access based on car or bus transportation, isn’t this discrimination?
Ask your state representative to do a transportation study of this elementary school. Hold schools and townships accountable for responsible use of public land to support all methods of transportation, not just auto.

And don’t these long lines of idling cars produce emissions and lower air quality around the school?
What about the asthmatics? These car lines are worse for their lungs than smoking…but all schools are no-smoking zones because we wouldn’t want to damage young, healthy lungs. But it’s perfectly OK to do it with FORCING car and bus transportation.
How idiotic and selfish.

This is a perfect example of institutions acting on the fear of litigation. Although I completely disagree with the districts asinine policy, regarding this matter, I wouldn’t be surprised that the main reason they did this was to protect themselves from parents who like to sue, to make easy money. Still doesn’t make that a good reason, especially when children’s and parents’ rights are violated.

Typical over reaching by authorities. And if you involve cops who have the paranoid, fearful thinking of many parents today, well then you have a crap load of problems coming your way. Sanctimony, fear, ignorance, and insecurity, along with having authority, are a bad combination. Which these district board members and police seem to have an abundance of.

I disagree 100% with the school. Having said that I like to try to see their side.

For the last 30 years there have been a steady increase of administration workload. Administrator outnumber teachers. Even the teacher’s role has changed to be more of an administrator and less of a teacher.

I speculate that this policy was put in place ‘for their convenience’. However I don’t mean to sound condescending. I am sickened at the administration workload that keeps being forced down their throat. Shit trickles downhill and the children end up catching it all.

This continual growing administration workload is as if they are a juggler. First they juggle 3 balls, then 4, 5, 6, and 7. More balls are being forced onto them. I suspect that this policy of ‘punishing students for walking home’ is their way (the school’s) of trying to survive.

People are paranoid.
When my mother moved to Windsor Ontario in 1928(she was 139 her mother was paranoid.
She was not allowed outside-without her 9-year old brother.
From 1928-1943, my mother and her brother Cecil were intimate friends.
Cecil screened my mother’s boyfriends-to prevent her from being linked to males who would behave indiscretely.
In some ways, it was good that I was born a male.
I had more freedom than I ever WOULD have had-if I had been born female.
(I was born in 1949. Three years later, my parents adopted a baby boy.)
I lived in Vancouver, British Columbia Canada.
The population was 375,000 in1949. It is 600,000 today.

-My mother was vehemently anti-gay and anti-feminist. She told me (in 1990)that she would no more let a boy of 10 play unsupervised that she would let a girl of that same age play unsupervised.

Micromanagement has become a plague.

We have seen countless examples of over zealous rules, (such as this one) we’ve seen it in ‘parent assisted esteem’ (not self esteem), and we’ve seen it where parents argue with teachers so that they can negotiate a better grade.

I’m all for condemning this rule. However in order to fight it, I’d like to better understand what prompted this rule in the first place. I think the fact that schools are under constant bombardment from parents has a lot to do with it. I wouldn’t be surprised if that before this rule was implemented, many parents complained because of the walking students would delay traffic. They can also use the ‘safety’ argument. Many people like to bitch. Whether or not their complaint is legit or pedantic. I feel sorry for the school because they have to deal with pedantic parents so often.

Roxanne, thank you for the extra info. Sounds lie the school district or local gov’t did not sufficiently fund this school building and need to budget for sidewalks posthaste, especially to the apt complex where I suspect the students with the least resources, transportation wise may reside.

Be that as it may, people should still be allowed to walk up and check their kids out of the dismissal line. The principal is possibly addressing the wrong problem:

1) are the parents that walk up blocking the queue for drivers by parking on the side of the road? A traffic enforcement officer writing those tickets would probably take care of that in a few afternoons.

2) are those parents parking in private lots and walking up? The owners of those lots can get some tow truck drivers to hang out and tow away.

It would be interesting to find out exactly how this situation developed.

Informative, ChicagoDad.
Perhaps the main problem here is in the design. Sounds like a perfectly hellish way to go about locating a school within a (so called) community…..when in fact, it is no community at all (not for kids, anyway) – just for cars.
Talk about training kids to get ready for commuting gridlock!
Just another example of how autokind trumps humankind.
Some quack of a suburban designer built it, and now they have to live with it.
What’s next in our future? Drive-thru schools?

45 _miles_ NNW

“Depends. Cars are the most space-wasting means of transportation, so if you WANT clogged up streets, better make sure everyone drives, for instance by designing (solely) for cars…”

There is a story about an American university that struggled with its landscaping. The problem was, students kept short-cutting across the lawn, which wore a pathway into the grass. No amount of “keep off the grass” was sufficient to deter them. They tried enforcing it with campus security, but that only worked when there was a campus security guy right there… if there wasn’t one, the old short-cutting habits returned. The school finally asked a prominent figure noted for wisdom (who I can’t recall at the moment, because it’s not really important to the story) how they could get the students to stop short-cutting through the grass.

The solution offered, of course, was “why don’t you put the sidewalks where people want to walk?”

The point being, that in today’s American culture, a lot of parents seem to want to drive their kids to school. The reasons for this are many and complex, and approximately none of them are under the control of the local grade schools. And the school may have been/probably was designed in a time when driving the kids to school wasn’t the most common method… kids walked or rode a bike if they lived close, and took a school bus if they did not. The notion that a parent would drive a child to school absent something like a doctor’s appointment or the dreaded missing-of-the-school-bus, was absurd. It’s not like we can now go back and give the grade schools a 400-spot parking lot with multiple-lane access to the nearest arterial.

“Old schools are retired (torn down or repurposed) and new ones built all the time.”

How nice for you to live somewhere where this is financially possible.

Alas, my state enacted property-tax reform that placed the state in charge of all school funding, and then began a systematic, two-decade defunding of the public school system. We have hundred-year-old buildings still in use, and most of the suburban districts have schools bulging at the seams because they can’t afford the capital costs to acquire land and build more schools. Meanwhile, several rural counties reflexively vote down any tax levy, regardless of purpose (or need) and then beg the federal government for funding for county services. (Once, revenues from federal lands within those counties were shared with the county governments; as the federal government de-emphasized logging on those lands, revenue-sharing with the counties declined accordingly. So they went with the oh-so-Republican solution of demanding that the federal government subsidize the county governments directly. All of the libraries are long-since closed, the state has reportedly considered taking over the functions of the county Sheriff’s offices.

Anyways, no, just tearing down the old schools and building new ones is not an available solution.

For comparison… the school district I graduated from in the mid-80’s had just grown from one high-school to two when I started HS. They now have 4, and need a 5th. The suburban district my daughter graduated from had three high-schools in the mid-80’s, they now have 5 and need a 6th. (They’ve been cheating by creating specialty schools to draw off some of the pressure… we now have, in addition to the 5 neighborhood high schools, an arts magnet school, a heath-careers high school, a science-and-technology high school, the “alternative” school for pregnant teens and students who have to work to support themselves, and the “Early College High School”… students take classes at the local community college, which count as both college credits and towards high school graduation. Some classes at the local neighborhood high school start the semester with more than 50 kids in them. This works OK for marching band, less well for AP Calculus.

” I still think a sidewalk wouldn’t have been too much to ask”

When I was in grade school myself, in the early 1970’s, the school was adjacent to a major arterial road (one that had a freeway on-ramp) but that arterial had no sidewalks. Most of the kids who walked to school did so by walking down the quiet back-street (that my house was on) but this wasn’t possible for everybody. Additionally, directly across the major arterial was the local junior-high.

It was suggested that the parents should agitate at the city council to have sidewalks put in.

It’s 40 years later, and sidewalks for that street have just been announced… they hope to have them completed within the next ten years.

(In the late 70’s and on into the early 80’s, the county was unable to pass road levies, and had to revert many streets to gravel. Between the end of my grade school and the start of my sister’s grade school years, we moved to a new housing development… literally, we went into one of the first houses completed and they built out in four phases. We had shiny new perfect streets within the housing development, because the developers were required to install them. In the first phase, only the through streets were completed. Then they added side streets and cul-de-sacs as they build the houses that fronted on them. Anyways, to go anywhere, you went on the nice smooth brand-new streets, to the county-maintained gravel road that linked the development to the road system, to the state-maintained highway.
They converted the gravel road to paved around the time I left for college. It still does not have sidewalks.

“‘several rural counties reflexively vote down any tax levy,’
If they think they’ll be funding big-city projects, I don’t blame them.”

Rural counties, by definition, don’t have big cities, or big city projects, in them. The “O+C timber counties” are between 200 and 300 miles from Portland.

“‘the oh-so-Republican solution’
We’re about 75% Republican around here.”

Yeah, that’s about what the timber counties are, except for Lane County (home of the UofO).and Marion County (home of the state capitol)

“‘an arts magnet school, a heath-careers high school, a science-and-technology high school, the “alternative” school for pregnant teens and students who have to work to support themselves,’

Since you claim new schools can’t be built in your area, I presume those tech-health-pregnant schools were old buildings repurposed?”

The alternative school has been there all along, but supports a very small number of students. Most of the rest operate in leased spaces, except that the school district took over a building that the university system used to own. It used to be shared by the local school district, the state university system, the local community college, and probably some others.

“However, your original point was that existing schools couldn’t be retrofitted for car dropoff and pickup.”

Not easily.
Here’s a view of the local grade school. (Note that if you turn around 180 degrees, you’ll be looking at the local suburban high-school, which has nearly 3000 students.
https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x54950f58079d6de7:0xf69e56376f867ece!2m5!2m2!1i80!2i80!3m1!2i100!3m1!7e115!4s/maps/place/rock%2Bcreek%2Belementary/@45.5491474,-122.8675328,3a,75y,271.08h,90t/data%3D*213m4*211e1*213m2*211sGNKVynoyfYq6RhuAd7wJCQ*212e0*214m2*213m1*211s0x0:0xf69e56376f867ece!5srock+creek+elementary+-+Google+Search&imagekey=!1e2!2sGNKVynoyfYq6RhuAd7wJCQ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjP6Mvv5JHMAhUN-GMKHXBqDNgQpx8IgAEwCg

This school fronts onto a major arterial. There are walking/bike paths out the back side of the school property onto local streets, but this intersection is the only way to drive in or out. This intersection is also the signal light for entry to the student parking lot… which is connected to another exit (with no light) farther up the street. Keep going another quarter mile up the street, and you can visit the local branch of the massive Portland Community College.

The challenge is the cost of land in the area. Property big enough to put a house on is more than $100K, finding a plot big enough to put a school on (at all) is a challenge, and the competition for plots that large is fairly intense.