by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Steve Soenksen works to provide children with safe access to educational facilities and increase awareness of the need for safer walking and biking routes to schools. Soenksen earned his bachelor’s degree from Taliesin and MArch from the New School of Architecture in San Diego, working in Phoenix creating modular and efficient schools between degree programs. Following the passage of SAFETEA-LU, the 2005 federal transportation bill, Soenksen—now residing in Alaska—became one of 50 federally funded Safe Routes to School (SRTS) coordinators working to improve access to and safety around America’s schools.

About SRTS: Each state has a SRTS coordinator. Congressman James Oberstar [D-Minn.], who put this amendment on the bill in the House Transportation Committee, felt very strongly about the importance of SRTS because he’d seen the model in other countries—Britain and Denmark—that had been very effective at reducing serious injuries and fatalities of children in the areas around schools.

Safe Routes to Schools encourages healthy integrated communities by considering a health, safety, and transportation nexus. For communities concerned about traffic jams, unsafe walking conditions, physically inactive lifestyles, and overall quality of life, an SRTS program can be an effective starting point for tackling these issues. People can make a difference and this program helps coordinate local efforts to make communities safer.

It focuses on the most vulnerable among us: children in grades K-8. If we can make a route to schools safe for young kids, even those with disabilities, it will be safe for all ages. It is a tool for change in re-integrating community. Prior to World War II, schools were centers of community. Since then and with the predominance of single-use zoning guiding land-use decisions, schools are held as a “special case.” They can be put anywhere, but little support has been given to date to integrate schools and the communities they serve. High levels of traffic and commuters have been the result with an estimated 30 percent of traffic at peak hours attributed to parents taking their children to and from school or events. If children could walk some or all of that, there would be a significant difference in traffic, congestion, public health, and safety.

If school buses are 12 times safer than driving kids to school, why don’t parents let their children walk, ride a bike, or take the school bus? Fear. Fear of danger, fear of threats. Fear is a very complicated thing to deal with, especially when you’re talking about your children. But when we start looking at routes around schools, there are two kinds of fear. There are real fears and there are perceived fears. The real fear is my child will be abducted by a sex molester and the rest is too horrible to think about. The reality is your child has a greater chance of getting struck by lightning than being abducted by a sex offender. If you teach your child what to do in an emergency or a situation that could turn into an emergency, that’s far more important than teaching them to be fearful of strangers. Most people are going to help a child in any way they can.

There are many neighborhoods where it’s not safe. We’ve got roads. We’ve got infrastructure. We’ve got arterials. We’ve got collectors. We’ve got all sorts of things that were designed to move cars faster, but when we start looking at how pedestrians interact with this, we see “No Pedestrians” signs on the road or no sidewalks, so the implied message is: If you’re not a car you shouldn’t be here. Yet this is what we call the public way. The only thing that links all of our private properties together is the public way, which we all share. How do we share that? Are we polite? Are we good citizens? Are we careful, or do we see how fast we can go and how quickly we can shave a few minutes off what we have to do so we can do the next thing? Many of us get caught up in that speed and pace of living and the other things get left behind.

What makes a route to school safe? That’s a very good question and I think the answer can only be given when you start to understand that safety is about levels of safety. Safety is a culture. Safety needs to be developed. When you have roads without sidewalks along the route to schools, how fast are the cars driving? If the cars are over 25 mph, it’s not that safe for kids to be walking close to the road, but it’s probably okay if there’s a separation between the sidewalk and curb and the street, perhaps with trees or landscaping, so there are degrees and levels of safety.

If you start to take it apart, a safe route to school is the kind of place where kids obviously aren’t threatened by an automobile, especially a high speed automobile. Many SRTS programs began because two parents meet over a cup of coffee or they run into each other at school and they say, “I’d let my child walk to school, but there’s always these SUVs going down the street at 45 mph and I don’t think it’s safe.” That concern sparked a SRTS program at a Boulder, Colo., school, Foothills Elementary. It started with two parents both saying “I don’t think it’s safe.” They shared that with the principal and asked if there was anything that could be done. The principal said there were other parents with the same concern and suggested they get together to talk. That started the process. They went from [fewer] than 20 percent of kids walking or biking to school to over 56 percent walking or biking to school in three years. Now, parents get together. They walk with their kids or maybe they have a group of parents who live in the same neighborhood and they put together what’s called a “walking school bus,” where one parent pulls a wagon or walks with the kids and is a pedestrian guide to the school.

What’s happening with SRTS in Alaska? Well, we started from scratch. Many states had some sort of state SRTS program that predated the federal legislation. In Alaska, we’re just getting started and we’ll have a grant program that comes out this year. We’re supporting Walk to School Day, which is October 3. International Walk to School Day is an opportunity for kids to participate in an activity that is happening around the world. Often those things are accompanied with assemblies and other things that help raise awareness for SRTS issues, but it’s also an opportunity for kids to walk or bike, even if they don’t generally, to see what that’s like. Many kids find that that’s a lot of fun to be able to spend some time with friends, so Walk to School Day is a pretty important thing that we’re supporting. We do a lot of outreach to communities and schools and other organizations. We find a lot of partners in other state agencies and government agencies.

Within the last couple of years, I think as part of No Child Left Behind, schools have found that some kids seem to be left behind educationally because they have poor nutrition or they don’t get some sort of nutrition before they show up. The same thing holds true for physical activity. Their circulation system, their respiratory system: all of that supports good brain function. If the brain doesn’t have enough oxygen, it certainly won’t function. There’s research now that says that if children have a half-hour or an hour of physical activity before school, they arrive far more ready to settle down and begin to focus on learning. They’ve had a chance to get the body up and moving and now the mind is ready to learn. So, trying to support these activities is a big part of the overall program.

A five-E approach: One of the unique things about the program is that it prescribes what we call the five-E approach for making an assessment: Education, Encouragement, Enforcement, Engineering, and Evaluation. Each part of the work that we do has some elements of the five-Es, but how do you encourage somebody to do something? That’s a deep topic. How do you help encourage people to do things so that they can then become enthusiastic about it themselves and take it on? Congressman Oberstar says that the SRTS program is actually an opportunity to affect the physical activity lifestyle of the next generation. If we find ourselves with rising rates of obesity, with either poor nutrition or the wrong kind of nutrition, and lack of physical activity, that has huge implications for us as a nation. So, we’re doing a lot of different things on a daily basis.

Architects’ role: SRTS is sort of a fix-it program. It tries to look at schools within communities and, using the tools of the five-E approach, figure out how to make it safer for kids to walk or bike. But in many cases what we run up against are schools that are poorly sited and poorly located on their sites. I’ve worked in architecture firms that do school design, and often the school district comes in and says we want as much square footage as we can get; we want it as fast as we can get it; and we want it for as low cost as possible. Architects try to ask questions about things like location and access and siting and all that, but the district says: “You’re the architect; you figure it out and you do the right thing.” And that’s the end of the meeting.

I’ve sat in too many of those to realize that from the beginning, architects are kept from having a positive influence in those design areas. We can design the best building we can come up with, but if the connectivity is off, it’s to no avail. So much of sustainable design talks about connectivity within community. Well, here’s a big area where architects can push a little bit harder in finding ways that their structures connect with the community and interact with the community. This comes back to what determines a safe route. Connectivity. How does it connect? Is the connection safe? Is it adequate? Is it well lit? Is the school the center of the community area, or is it on the edge of community area? Is it out on the fringe where the school district buys cheap property?

For many years, the Council of Educational Facility Planners International said that if you’re doing an elementary school you need 10 acres. If you’re doing a middle school, you need 20 acres. If you’re doing a high school, you need 30 acres. Why? Well, you need playfields. You need room for expansion. That’s a huge acreage requirement, and for many years, schools bought that. They said, “Hey, if we’re getting that big of an acreage, we can build bigger schools, consolidate them, and have smaller administrative staff.” We know that the mega-school idea is not really the most productive way to educate kids either, so architects involved in education struggle with a variety of these issues, but I think architects can have a greater impact in raising some of these issues and trying to get them resolved in a way that really supports community.

It’s about the building, but it’s about the connectivity of how that building works in the community. In some states right now, it’s happening. Like I said, SRTS is a fix-it program. We’ve got schools out on the fringe. We’ve got mega-schools. We’ve got many schools that aren’t in the center of the community or even close to it, so walking or biking just isn’t an option. The biggest obstacle for SRTS in over 56 percent of the cases is distance. It’s just too far for kids to walk or bike, so they have to ride a bus or some form of motorized transportation to get there.

But what’s happening is that schools have declining budgets. In some states, they’re actually redesigning their districts and redrawing the attendance area of the school so that no part of the attendance area is more than two miles away. SRTS considers one mile around middle and elementary school safe for walking and two miles safe for biking. Beyond that it’s too far, but some schools are actually redesigning their district so that they don’t have to have motorized transportation. One district that I heard a case study on saved $500,000 to $700,000 a year. That made a difference so that they could add more teachers, which they really needed for education.

If you’re a school, would you rather spend money on pupil transportation or on education? Architects I think can support those kinds of questions and dialogue. Schools don’t often ask for it and often don’t want to participate in that. Schools in my experience are very concerned about what happens within the walls, but they’re not that concerned about what happens outside the walls of the school, so that is where architects can help raise some issues and help provide some very workable solutions.

I think we’re at a point right now where many of these questions are beginning to be asked because of the SRTS program. It was put together because nationally this is a problem. This is a concern. The amount of money we spend on schools is huge, and we should certainly get a good value for our investment.