Category: school designs

Can’t walk to school? Whose fault, really?

To everyone who wants to blame:
— the school board
— the health department
— the county commissioners
— school desegregation
— me
— the Observer’s editorial board
— whoever else is handy …

… for the fact that in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, as in many communities around the nation, it’s difficult for most kids to walk to school, I offer the following complexities for your consideration. (If you’re new to this, first visit my posting from yesterday, “Why it’s not easy to walk to school,” and the comments on it.) Now, here are a few things to ponder, among the many realities that affect the situation:
— Until the late 1990s, the city of Charlotte didn’t require developers to build many sidewalks in their new developments.
— The city’s budget for retrofitting streets with sidewalks, while expanding, is pitifully inadequate.
— In North Carolina counties have no responsibility for streets or roads or sidewalks. Either the city builds and maintains them, or the state does. The state’s attitude used to be to discourage any sidewalks built outside a municipal jurisdiction. Much of what’s now inside Charlotte was in unincorporated Mecklenburg County when it was built (and later was annexed). Thus, few sidewalks.

— Most of suburban Charlotte is pedestrian-hostile, with wide and busy intersections, few pedestrian lights and crosswalks, long blocks and little connectivity.

— Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, in its building designs and site-size requirements, followed state requirements based on a national organization, meaning those requirements exist all over the country. Only in recent years have some N.C. requirements become “guidelines” which school systems can occasionally bypass. The requirements included huge sites: e.g. 18 acres for elementary schools, 60 for high schools. CMS, to its credit, is building on smaller sites when it can, and building more multistory schools, which need slightly smaller footprint. And it’s trying to keep walkability (and transit) in mind for newer schools.
— CMS has been harangued for years by the anti-tax crowd to be more economical in its school building, so like many large systems slammed with growth, it moved to larger (I would say too large) schools. Larger schools mean students must come from farther away, making it harder for them to walk, especially in Charlotte’s pedestrian-hostile suburban areas.
— The appropriate elected officials to blame for crowded schools are the county commissioners. They’re the ones who allocate money — or don’t — to build new schools and maintain old ones. The school board asks, but usually doesn’t receive all it asks for.

— While some comments have noted the can’t-walk-to-school situation isn’t universal, it is common across America, even where there was no school busing for integration. Desegregation is essentially a red herring in this debate. Further, even when there was plenty of busing for integration, some kids attended schools nearby for at least part of their schooling.
Yes, it’s theoretically possible a push for more walkable schools might have arisen earlier if all children were attending schools nearby. But I’ve lived in Charlotte 30 years and the whole “walkability” movement — irrespective of school kids — was nonexistent for most of that time.

Why it’s not easy to walk to school

“Why was it necessary to create a job in the health dept. to encourage kids to walk to schools? Isn’t that something a principal/teachers/student nurse could communicate to the parents?”

Good question, from a comment on the previous posting. The situation is complicated. A few administrators at schools here (and other cities as well) don’t want kids walking to school. They think it’s unsafe. They think kids already have bus rides so why would they want to walk? In addition, many principals spend their time trying to make sure kids are learning and teachers are teaching. How students arrive at school — as long as it’s not causing immediate problems — is way, way down the list. I wish the case were otherwise, but it’s not realistic to think that will change.

And school nurses? Most school nurses are assigned to multiple schools and barely have time to turn around, must less launch campaigns to encourage walking.

But there are other problems, too, that even the principals who DO want kids to walk or bike can’t surmount: Lack of sidewalks. Lack of crosswalks. Lack of midblock stoplights on long, long blocks. Lack of bike lanes. Lack of crossing guards. Those policies and decisions are not within a principal’s authority, but reside with the City of Charlotte.

And it’s even more complicated. Plenty of schools were built and designed for car- and-bus-only transportation. They’re not in pedestrian-friendly settings. Here’s a good example: Unless things have changed in the last couple of years, Greenway Park Elementary sits right next to the McAlpine Greenway, yet there’s no pedestrian connection to the greenway. The school, like many, sits so far back from the road and its sidewalk that the whole setting conveys a subliminal message of “Don’t walk here.” Technically, of course, you can walk to that school. But it wouldn’t be very efficient or pleasant.

Older schools — Eastover, Myers Park Traditional, Davidson Middle, Midwood School, the old Wilmore School (now used for offices) — were built when it was expected that kids would walk to school. That fell out of favor, all over the country.

School designs for the past 40 years had almost nothing to do with whether the assignment zones were neighborhood-school or crosstown busing. You see the same styles all over the country, not just in Charlotte. They have to do with state school design guidelines (influenced by national standards), traffic engineering and the architectural mode and practices of the day when they were built.

Reversing all the policies that combine to create an anti-walking environment is a huge task. I don’t wany my school principals having to tackle it. They have another mission.