Safe Routes to School is a very popular federal program designed to make is easier for students to walk and bike to school. What if we instead chose to build Schools on Safe Routes?
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Provo, UT is undertaking a grand experiment in suburbanizing a public high school. Here are 3 major problems with that plan.
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As a society, we are zealous when it comes to the safety of children. And rightfully so. Still, for some reason we find it perfectly acceptable to routinely include them in the most dangerous activity of American life: riding in a car.
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This week, we're inviting readers to join us for an open conversation with President of Strong Towns, Chuck Marohn on the topic of schools.
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When you're faced with the choice of living in an urban neighborhood with "poor" schools, or a suburban neighborhood with "good" schools, you find a work around. That's what these entrepreneurial spirits did in San Francisco.
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Share photos of your children's trip to school with the hashtag #SchoolCommute
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We will not have strong cities, towns and neighborhoods without our school systems being part of the effort.
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In closing many neighborhood schools over the years, my local school district has walked away from neighborhoods that are already struggling, making the situation in those places much worse.
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Tulsa, OK is one of the most unlikely suspects to attract urban, entrepreneurial millennials. Yet here we are.
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A year ago, I wrote about an old school being converted into a community center. This photo collection shows what has happened since, the results of Strong Citizenship.
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I have a lot of conversations with people about the challenge of improving public schools, building affordable housing, and more. But the truth is, we as a society don’t want to solve these problems. So we won’t.
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Our latest featured post from the member blogroll comes to us from Paul Fritz’s blog, Small Town Urbanism. This piece was inspired by a conversation Paul had with Strong Towns founder, Chuck Marohn, after a recent event in Santa Rosa, CA.
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There’s a weird war raging these days between people who advocate high rise living in the urban core and folks who can’t stand to live in anything but a fully detached home on a quarter acre lot. I always choose the thing in the middle. I’m a Main Street kind of guy.
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From the small town of Republic, MO comes this story about a dangerous route to school that has resulted in dozens of accidents.
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While our modern stroad environments discourage children from walking to school, George is fighting back, and helping his daughters gain independence in the process.
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Our friend and Strong Towns member Steven Shultis from Springfield, Massachusetts, joins Chuck this week to talk about his experience as a parent of children in an urban school system.
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What if we didn't transform an empty school through an expensive mega-project? What if we could break it down into incremental steps?
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“I want more people living downtown. I want it more dense. But to permit the use to change fifteen years from now without public approval is not OK. I have this neighborhood where I have an expectation, and then it changes. That’s not OK.”
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Let’s stop and reevaluate. Let’s assess what’s really important in our community. Building an over-sized school on over-sized road on an over-sized parcel strikes me as irresponsible. We need to return to a neighborhood model. We need to find the locations that don’t need a Safe Routes to School grants and build there. The places we are collectively building are places that our children hate. They’re inhuman, disregard our existing neighborhoods, cost us more money and unnecessarily burden parents.
Let’s make a change.
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Safe Routes to School is a very popular federal program designed to make is easier for students to walk and bike to school. The amount spent on it, however, is a tiny fraction of what we spend each year building brand new schools.