An upstate New York mother is fighting a school policy that prohibits her 12-year-old son from riding his bike to and from school each day. Seventh-grader Adam Marino and his mother, Janette Kaddo Marino, were met one day by a school administrator and a state trooper who told them that biking and walking to the school are “banned.” Students must either take the school bus or be driven to school by someone else.
Mom says the school has no right to tell her how to get her son to school, and the school agrees–sort of. “The existing policy is worded in such a way that it may lead one to believe that we’re prohibiting biking to school,” Saratoga Springs superintendent Janice White tells the Albany Times-Union. According to school board handbook: “The riding of bicycles by elementary pupils to and from school is prohibited.”
Yeah, that is pretty ambiguous.
I have a major problem with any administrator who thinks they have any say in what a person does or does not do when they are off of school grounds.
My own thought was along the lines of “Oh, to live and work at a school where this is all they have to worry about.”
Obi – I agree, with the caveat ” at school-sponsored events”. I would especially like to deep-six the rule that athletes playing a school sport season are prohibited from even practicing with their club/rec team(s) during the school season. Virginia used to have this rule and Minnesota still does. Why should the school have any say about what its athletes do in their free time?
Around us – they won’t let them walk home unless they live within a mile and have a sidewalk the whole way. The school is less than a half mile away, and you have to walk a third of that distance (with no sidewalk) to get to the school bus. Another 500′ from the bus is the traffic light, with a sidewalk on the other side. In other words, they can’t a quarter mile without a side walk, but they can walk about .15 miles without one.
Meanwhile, when they ride the bus home, my kindergartners can’t leave the bus unless someone over 12, with a picture ID and a name on the approved list, is there to meet them. My 11 year old, who’s home schooled, can’t meet them there. However, if they had an older sibling – even a first grader – on the bus, they could walk home with him. They can walk home with a 6 year old, but not an eleven year old. (If my older son were in public school, they still couldn’t walk home with him – he would be on a different bus from middle school, and wouldn’t be eligible for the “on the same bus” loophole. So no eleven year old could walk them home, unless he happened to have been held back two grades).
All part of the brilliance that it the public school system.
Robert,
If the policy only applies to elementary school students, and the child is 12, is there not a fair assumption that he’s past the age of consent, as it were?
As I recall it, I frequently walked the dangerous roads of Greenwich Connecticut back in the last century, without sidewalks, to get to school. Maybe I’m just mis-remembering.
In any case, where’s Ron Kuby when we need him?
We had a similar situation at my school. The boy and his sister literally walked across the street and through the parking lot to get to school. The district transportation person said that it was to dangerous for them to walk to school The mother of the students would walk them across the street and then allow them to walk the rest of the way. They were in fourth and seventh grade.
I’m here. Looks like everything is under control, though. It is easy to see how the State Troopers got confused by that “bicycle riding . . . is prohibited” thing. Glad the school clarified that “is prohibited” means “is permitted.”
Wow. We had kind of the opposite fight in our district, when the cut almost all non-special ed bus runs, leaving one low-income neighborhood with a 2.5 mile walk to its neighborhood elementary school. The district Business Manager pointed out that kids eligible for Free Lunch were also eligible for free city bus passes (not that there was even a direct city bus line to the school…).
In California we’re too broke to be over protective.
Here in NYC my kids walked to school BY THEMSELVES (bustling urban neighborhood) starting at age 11. The NYC DOE provides only limited busing which becomes virtually non-existent once kids hit 6th grade, so there are many 11 year olds riding subways, taking city buses and walking on their own to and from school. I’ve been to Saratoga… I can’t believe the risks are higher there than here in Gotham.
Another reason to revise planning standards to prevent building housing w/o sidewalks. I have never lived in an area where you couldn’t walk to school; our kids walked from age 6. It is a dense neighborhood; as soon as they were out the door, they were part of a stream of kids heading to/from school. The only kids who were dropped off at school were the ones who were late!