Tax-exempt properties have a significant fiscal footprint. Do we understand the impacts we create through the too-often wasteful way we design and build public facilities such as city halls, schools, libraries, and parks?
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Community Builder Jacob Moses converses with Kevin Leier—a social studies teacher at Rugby High School in North Dakota—and a few of his students about their new community building class inspired by Strong Towns.
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Now that my city’s downtown is starting to thrive, we’re facing a new problem: a barrage of attempts to move centrally-located public facilities to unwalkable, suburban (and even undeveloped) areas.
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In this episode of our podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob chats with Latoya Wilson—founder of the Rebuild Workforce Consultancy—shares how you can invest in the youth in your community, including how to understand the learning landscape for youth, how to create programs that are beneficial for students, and how to make your investments last throughout a student’s time in primary school and beyond.
San Jose, California has embraced active transportation and pledged to eliminate vehicular deaths. So why is the city intent on widening a neighborhood street and building a four-lane overpass next to an elementary school?
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Once you get everyone pedaling, they become a team, unified by the excitement of riding together. Once everyone’s on a bike, all you see are smiles.
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Lakewood, OH is a "walking school district." The town has never, in its history, owned schoolbuses, so streets are designed to ensure that every child can walk or bike to school.
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The challenge of improving the American public school system is enormous and complex. It's a conversation we need to keep having.
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Most teachers I know are amazing people, but the system they're working under doesn't always produce the best teachers to meet the needs of every kid. Here's a different approach.
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As part of our Strong Schools campaign, we asked readers to share photographs of your children's trip to school with the hashtag #SchoolCommute. Here is a selection of some of the best submissions we received.
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In college, the action—whether a campus job, the library, the cafeteria or all your best friends—was within a 10 minute walk of your house. There's no reason that experience has to be confined to a four-year period of life, no reason it has to cost tens of thousands of dollars in annual tuition to partake in.
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In this follow-up to his 2015 podcast interview, Steven Shultis shares his perspective on raising a family in a walkable neighborhood and choosing to send his kids to an urban school.
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There’s just no reason why a four-year college degree should cost anything like what it does. Here's a different model.
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This data shows that if you want a successful economy, you have to have a talented population.
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A new high school is heralded as a model of innovation, but it's part of a depressing trend in modern school planning: isolated facilities on the unwalkable fringe.
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In this podcast interview, Steve Shultis shares his perspective on raising a family in a walkable neighborhood and choosing to send his kids to an urban school.
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Like so much of our modern world, we seem to have boiled education down to a series of discrete inputs and outputs. This is convenient for making measurements, but I’m not convinced we have obtained any more wisdom about collectively raising productive, intelligent children in the last two centuries of public schools in the US than our distant ancestors.
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What if we shifted all transportation funding into the classroom? What if we ended the mandate for schools to provide transportation?
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7 steps to taking the leap and getting the most out of urban public schools.
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5 things I learned while teaching my kids to use public transit.
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