Goal is to get students walking, bicycling

Tom Held:

As children make their way back to classrooms, schools and municipalities in Wisconsin will start spending $4 million in federal transportation grants to encourage and help more of them make that trek by foot or bicycle.

Milwaukee Public Schools will spend the largest planning grant, $242,000, to teach 6,000 grade school and middle school students how to walk or bike to school safely.

That such an educational program is deemed necessary suggests how much society has changed from a time in the late 1960s when more than half of the students in the country walked or biked to school. That percentage has dropped to 15%, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

The decline in walking or biking to school has been cited as a cause behind a different trend: the growing number of children who are overweight or obese. A national study found that 18.8% of children ages 6 to 11 were obese in 2003'-04, roughly triple the percentage found two decades earlier.

Looking to reverse the trends, Congress allocated $612 million for the national Safe Routes to Schools program, spread across the 2005-'09 fiscal years.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 5, 2007 12:00 AM
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