Safe Routes to School Network

Related: Federation 2010 Annual Report, Missouri Safe Routes to School 2010 Progress Report

The Missouri Foundation for Bicycling and Walking is a 501(c)(3) charitable and educational corporation dedicated to promoting bicycling and walking and making Missouri a better, safer place to walk and bicycle.

Your tax-deductible donations to the Foundation helped make 2010 the Foundation's best and most productive ever.  Highlights of the Foundation's 2010 Annual Report:

The Washington Post covered the signing of a new child nutrition bill:

Michelle Obama can check off a top priority on her to-do list: The child nutrition bill was signed into law by her husband Monday morning, capping months of advocacy by the first lady as part of her efforts to reduce childhood obesity.

Flanked by Cabinet officials, top Democrats and schoolchildren in green and yellow uniforms, President Obamasaid that "across the country, too many kids don't have access to healthy meals."

The EPA has released draft guidelines for school siting--guidelines that take into account such factors as whether children can safely bicycle and walk to the new schools, and amount of traffic and congestion that will be caused, and other factors:

More than 53 million children and about 6 million adults spend a significant portion of their days in more than 120,000 public and private school buildings. Many of these buildings are old and in poor condition, and may contain environmental conditions that inhibit learning and pose increased risks to the health of children and staff. The healthy school environments web site is designed to provide one-stop access to the many programs and resources available to help prevent and resolve environmental issues in schools.

EPA has released new draft guidelines to help communities protect the health of students and staff from environmental threats when selecting new locations for schools.  The new draft voluntary guidelines will help local communities consider environmental health issues in establishing school site selection criteria and in conducting effective environmental reviews of prospective school sites.  The draft guidelines recommend involving the public in the site selection process from the beginning to help ensure community support for these decisions.   

Tuesday Renee Kuhlman of the National Trust for Historic Preservation presented a webinar to the Missouri Safe Routes to School Network entitled, "Overcoming Barriers to Community-Centered Schools".

The presentation highlighted the reasons for creating and preserving community-centered schools--the help create vibrant communities, reduce environmental impact, save on costs, and create healthier communities where more kids (and parents) can walk or bike to school.

For those who missed the webinar, Renee was gracious enough to share allow us to share the presentation online:

• View and listen to a multi-media recording of the webinar
• Presentation in Powerpoint format (17MB)
• Presentation in PDF format (4MB)

Here are some of the resources and links mentioned during the webinar:

• The National Trust's web pages about community centered schools: 
  http://www.pr

Please join us Sept 28, 2010 at 9:30 to kick off walk to school month with a special presentation from Renee Kulhman the Director of Special Projects, Center for State and Local Policy at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The webinar is hosted by MoBikeFed and the Missouri Safe Routes to School Network.

Click here to register

Wanting to encourage more kids to walk and bicycle to school?

Worried about new schools being built in your area in remote locations, where kids have no chance to walk or bicycle there?

Wanting to preserve historic, walkable, neighborhood based schools in your area?

Then this webinar is for you--and it's FREE.

Attendance is capped at 50, so sign up soon.

Webinar details

 Sept 28, 2010
 9:30am-11:00am
 Online webinar, view on your computer (you'll receive the WWW link when you register)

This webinar will focus on the The Helping Johnny Walk to School: Sustaining Communities through Smart Policy program which helps states encourage the siting of schools to achieve their educational, public health, and sustainability objectives. 

Presenter Renee Kuhlman helps advocates working towards sustainable communities.

The Oklahamo Safe Routes to School Network has created a classroom-ready pedestrian safety curriculum for K-3 students.

The curriculum can be freely used and adapted by schools and teachers to create and teach pedestrian safety skills in the classroom.

Click here to download the curriculum (PDF file).

File: 

K-2_%20WalkSmartCurriculum[1].pdf

October is Walk to School Month! 

The Missouri Safe Routes to School Network invites all schools and communities to participate in International Walk to School Day on Wednesday, October 6th, 2010, Walk to School Week October 4-8, and Walk to School Month the entire month of October.

A Walk to School event at your local school is a lot of fun and gets a lot of kids walking and bicycling.

A Walk to School event can be started by a parent, a teacher, a PTA, a school principal or administrator, or even a student.

Walking to school is a great way for kids to get some healthy exercise and have fun at the same time. What's more, families who walk to school save on gas, as well as reducing congestion and air pollution around school.

To make it easy to organize an event, we made a checklist and various resources available for download below.

Please consider joining 3,000 other schools in the United States (3,000,000 children worldwide) by participating in this program.

Here are all the materials you need to plan a Walk to School event in your community:

File: 

Walk to School Day planning timeline & checklist

Walk to School Day participation response form

Walk to School Day generic flyer

Today the Missouri Safe Routes to School Network released its first progress report (PDF file).

The Missouri SRTS Network, which is working to encourage more children to bicycle and walk to school more often, has Action Teams in twelve specific areas, designed to create policy change in Missouri to move Safe Routes to School forward.

A summary of the progress since January 2010 in each of the Network's twelve Action Areas: