Safe Routes To School: City-SRTS Pilot Program

Introduction | History | Activities | Planning | Safe School Zones | Walking School Buses | Funding | Resources | City-SRTS Pilot Program | Journals | Workshops | Community Assessment Tool

Safe Routes to School (SRTS) is about kids walking and biking to school regularly, routinely and safely. It is also the name for a growing, international campaign that started over 30 years ago in Denmark (where now more than 70% of school children bike and walk to school), and has since spread to many countries including the United States.

Sharon Roerty has been involved in promoting and implementing safe routes to school programs and activities since 2000, She started to notice a pattern, a sameness to the programs and more explicitly to the places that were initiating SRTS programs. With some exceptions, she saw that SRTS programs were primarily getting started in middle and upper middle class suburban communities – communities that are well heeled in the art of civic involvement and communities that can count on savvy grant writers. The SRTS delivery tools seemed to be directed at those audiences as well.

One other thing that has become increasingly obvious was that the SRTS images are typically of homogeneous suburban communities. Sharon began to wonder if the early SRTS program adopters were reflections of the images and an approach that worked for some but not for all.

In 2006 the ALRC staff began work on a SRTS program for diverse populations in heavily urbanized environments where schools are typically located in the middle of cities with row homes, multi-family dwellings and industrial neighbors. The idea was not to stop what was already happening but rather to make sure that the distribution of SRTS resources particularly the federal money and all of the resources that accompany it addresses and reaches all of its intended targets, including the underserved.

A series of pilot workshops were presented in communities across the United States. You can download and read the reports from the first and second year of the program. They are:

Year One

• Ames Middle School, Chicago, IL | PDF File 436KB
• McCutcheon Elementary School, Chicago, IL | PDF File 462KB
• Wenonah Elementary School, Birmingham, AL | PDF File 243KB
• Ensley Head Start, Birmingham, AL | PDF File 498KB
• Monroe Community School, St. Paul, MN | PDF File 113KB

• City-SRTS Pilot Report | PDF File 722KB

Year Two

• Capitol View Elementary School, Atlanta, GA | PDF File 673KB
• Benteen Elementary School, Atlanta, GA | PDF File 673KB
• PS 5 and PS 7, Garfield, NJ | PDF File 615KB
• PS 81, Brooklyn, NY | PDF File 722KB
• Annie Fisher and MD Fox Elementary Schools, Hartford, CT | PDF File 5.27MB
• Kerr Middle School and Whittier Elementary School, Blue Island, IL | PDF File 693KB
• Chapman and McDonnell Elementary Schools, Huntsville, AL | PDF File 4.43MB
• City-SRTS Flash Presentation

Note: You'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader in order to read the items listed above. If you don't have Acrobat Reader already installed on your computer, you can get it here.