If you want kids to be independent btw, maybe change the laws. I used to take the train to school by myself when I was ten. Pretty sure a parent could be charged with neglect in many places in America for letting their ten year old go off on a 30 minute trek by themselves.
Definitely a big part of it. That mom who was arrested for letting her 10 year old boy walk into town recently just illustrates our different culture and legal expectations than when we were growing up.
Yep, I watched this trend grow while I was working in the school market. It's ridiculous. I walked and biked to my elementary (our bike racks were FULL of bikes), middle and high school, as well as bussed (winter).
It was fun, and we enjoyed it.
Some of this is because of the simultaneous -national fear campaign about people abducting children, and also - this police state BS whereby it's considered criminal to let you kids outside unattended.
But it's also, helicopter parenting, lazy children (and their lazy children, now adult parents), and the same mobile culture that has people ordering DoorDash for garbage fast food, or Amazon, or whatever... anything for "convenience".
hell, when I was a kid, it was humiliating for your parents to walk you to your bus stop, and/or stay there until you were picked up.
Although, as an aside, a few years ago, I found a toddler, wandering around near a 50 mph road, next to some townhomes. It took me 5 minutes of knocking on doors to find his home and shitbag parents.
There's just too many parts of our culture and society, disintegrating at once, to keep track, or to fix them all in isolation.
Yes, I have seen it in my own communities. Was somewhat rare to be driven to school by a parent back in my parts of Oklahoma, but now has become more normal. Even if we didn't walk or bike, pretty much everyone rode the school bus.
That's pretty crazy about the toddler! I guess it shows you all this stuff is more generalizations. We can spot counter examples all over.
Either way, it's a shame. Riding our bikes home after school, or chatting it up on the school bus, was a lotta fun when you're just a kid, and it was also a place where you could cut loose a little, since we were under pretty tight controls at the actual schoolhouse. Today's kids, like so many things, have no idea what they are missing!
I grew up in northern Canada. We biked to school if there wasn’t too much snow and ice, walked otherwise (no, it wasn’t 5 miles, it was a quarter mile). Below about 30 below zero (F) we were allowed to eat our bag lunch at school (there was no food of any kind served at school). School was canceled at 40 below. Nobody got a ride to school unless they were coming from a dental appointment or something.
The school pick up and drop off lines like this are real. If you’re going to send your kid to public school then put them on a bus. If you won’t put them on the bus, stop proclaiming you’re desire to save the environment while you sit in your idling car.
When my kids were in K-12, we lived in suburban San Francisco. No sidewalks in our town, particularly in the hills, no school bus service, and no public transit. So we had to drive them to school in the morning before I went to work and arrange for sitters in the afternoons to pick them up at 3:00 p.m. I used to joke (but not really) that our school district was keeping women at home, especially when you also considered the vast amount of volunteerism the school district required. There were no teachers’ aides, no secretaries except for the one assigned to the Principal, and no drivers for class field trips.
Our schools run on the unpaid labor of women. If you totaled up the volunteer man-hours our schools receive and actually assigned a wage to them, the ACTUAL cost of an education would be far higher than what we believe it to be now. I would love to see all the moms who drive and volunteer their time to literally go on strike for a month. The whole system would grind to a halt and maybe, just maybe, we could get the funding we need to run public education effectively. But who am I kidding? Women’s time is not valuable in this society.
This is actually an interesting angle. It forces a parent to basically work part-time, and that often falls on women. It's ironic because we have higher rates of women in the work force than in the 1960s, yet there is now this added burden of getting kids to school (not just on the bus or out the door). Tough for moms.
The school asks for a special millage (like a special tax) that then goes on your property taxes based on how much your house is worth. This then gets put on the ballot for people to vote on. For example, we own an extra parcel of land. For our summer taxes, the state education tax millage is 6. So they take the taxable value of the land (which is approx half of its worth) and multiple by .006 and we pay $73.37. That’s not a lot for a spare piece of land, nor do we pay a ridiculously high amount on our bill for our home property taxes. But we live in a reasonable school district, and I was more than fine voting for special millages for our school district to do some upkeep. My parents live in the district I mentioned. Not only do they pay the normal millage for school operation, but then the school asked for a separate new millage to do all their pie-in-the-sky “improvements.” This millage will be an additional tax for, I believe, 25 years. (If I recall, this new millage increased my parents’ taxes by $500/yr, which is a lot for someone on a fixed income. Also, as the county reassesses property values-generally higher-every year, the extra will continue to be larger every year.) Then the school decided they needed another additional millage because they couldn’t seem to properly budget the 60 million plus they got from that millage. We do not live in an area of great affluence. However, some local elites were quite vocal about voting for the 60+ millage and the teachers were even giving extra credit to students who were eligible to vote if they went to vote in favor of the increase. The second extra millage vote failed, and I doubt they’ll be able to get much more money out of the community, especially as the waste comes to light. Did the football field need astroturf? No. Did the cafeteria need Mongolian BBQ? No. Did they need a food truck for concessions at sporting events? No. The students needed quality teachers.
So it's a parcel tax. OK, got it now. And they misspent the money, according to you. That's fine, but you can't take an anecdotal example and apply it to all school districts around the country. There's a difference between "waste" and misappropriation. The school board should be recalled or voted out. I'd even go so far as to say you probably have a case for a class action lawsuit against the school district.
I have no problem with teacher salaries. We live in a town adjacent to where a school system just did a special mileage for over 60 million. (This is the school I attended.) Much of this money that was supposed to “improve” the school (improve apparently included adding a Mongolian BBQ to the cafeteria) actually went to a fancy football field and food truck. Then, within a couple years, they came back with their hands out for more and got soundly rejected by the blue collar people who this town is made up of who couldn’t actually afford the first round that the few elite managed to push through by using voting 18 year old high school students at the polls who will never have to fund any of it.
I homeschooled my kids. Had they gone to public school, yes, I would have been volunteering. However, they should not need volunteers as they get plenty of tax money. As a taxpayer and a previously publicly educated student myself, I can see there is a lot of waste.
Where, exactly is the waste? In teacher salaries? In program cuts? In providing special ed to those who need it? Please, do go on about the waste in public education.
Nothing becomes more efficient by taking money at gunpoint and filtering it through a series of bureaucracies. How about we start paying our men enough they can support their wives staying home with the children, rather than taxing the men even more so their wives have to work full time at the school?
It’s the cars! We’re far enough from the school that the kids get to ride the bus. I’ve walked home with my older one a few times, but I wouldn’t let them walk alone. There’s a major highway they have to cross, with a stoplight and crosswalk, but even the school bus drivers aren’t attentive enough to see people in that crosswalk. Their school was built in the 60’s and just last summer the city put a sidewalk along the only road to the school (in a suburban neighborhood, not remote in any way). The way my neighbors drive is too selfishly aggressive to trust them to see my minions. And the trucks these days that have a hood higher than a kid’s head are so dangerous! I hate this car centric approach.
I drove my child because if not, she would be on the bus almost an hour each way. The bus had this weird winding route. And, the bus stop couldn’t be anywhere near my house. They wanted a middle schooler to walk down our street, turn the corner, walk just as far down that street, cross the road & stand on a corner that had a hill & no way to access the side walk other than to walk up the homeowner’s driveway. the bus would pick child up, & then turn down our road driving passed our house. I thought it might get better in high school. Nope. Again the bus stop was a ways away & crossing a street. And, it was another long ride but not quite an hour. Sometimes the bus wouldn’t even show up. After waiting with child at the bus stop in the rain for no bus to show up. I again gave up & drove the 3 miles to school. Driving child to school was an inconvenience but totally worth it!
Yes, I have heard versions of this. I think with cuts to buses, routes have gotten longer and more winding. Hard to blame parents in this case, too. Sitting on the bus over an hour isn’t ideal.
I am glad you mentioned the hysteria over abductions as a driving factor for the phenomenon of school pickup lines. The data is clear that it is nowhere near the problem that the news and social media make it out to be. For a lack of a better term, abduction is romanticized in American society. The image of an innocent child being snatched up in an instance by an evildoer for insidious purposes is implanted in our minds, yet in actual crime statistics, this is an exceedingly rare occurrence. There's an entire corner of the internet dedicated to uncovering new "methods" people use to kidnap children and women, perpetuating this culture of fear.
Part of the solution to this problem will have to be convincing parents it's safe to let their kids get to school without being driven there, whether by bus, bike, or on foot. I'm worried that this fear will outweigh any attempts to reorganize cities to make the journey to school more feasible on foot, by bike, or with public transit unless it is directly addressed.
Yes, it goes into the idea of "if it bleeds, it leads" in media, that has only been exacerbated by social media and the internet. I don't actually have a good answer, other than trying to bring more attention to the issue. It does make support for public transit, walking, etc more difficult. So it's an up hill battle.
1) I got kicked off the bus for graffiti in 5th grade. Got to ride my bike 2 miles to school.
2) I live in a rural suburb now. No sidewalks. The school is 25 lots away and completely un-walkable or bikable. Dear doge: please return funds to municipalities
That's tough! It sounds like your school was similar to mine in distance and space. No way would I have been allowed to bike. Not sure what my parents would have done if I got kicked off!
Another change I don’t believe was mentioned was school start times. Our school growing up started at 8. If I had lived close enough to walk or bike (we lived in the country and our elementary school was 6 miles crossing a busy highway with no light) then we might have biked occasionally, but as it was, the bus came at 7:30. The school my son is slated to that he attended for one year before we switched to private school began at 7:35am. It’s 4 miles away across a busy highway with no sidewalk, also rural. His morning bus came at 6:37 and we had to walk/drive him to the front of our neighborhood which is 3/4 a mile from the house. You can see why the bus wasn’t desirable when I could drive him in less than 8 minutes almost an hour later than the bus came. These early elementary starts are not for the faint-hearted. In Japan , my sisters’ kids get on their bus that they walk about 1/2 mile (5 months a year of snow) on a country rode and board at 7:40 and get to school for an 8am start. And no phones allowed on the bus for messing around. Different rules make a huge difference.
Interesting. I had not heard anything about starting times yet. Definitely worth a closer look. Thank you for comment. I will look into this for a future post.
Our district has a very expensive fee for students to take the school bus. So of course you’re going to drive your kid—it’s not worth $800 for the school bus.
I lived across the street from my kids elementary school and they said we were not allowed to walk our child in or out, this was just last year 2024 for reference. I tried to argue but they refused. Ridiculous
They said safety. Because so many people drive (because they are forced to) it makes the parking lot hazardous for walking in. 🙄 I gave up at that point.
Oh my goodness, just had this conversation with the husband yesterday, driving in a school zone and gobsmacked over the number of parents with their perfectly capable and old enough children. And down the road, we learned never to drive by the high school either before or after school because of the pickup and drop off traffic trailing out and blocking the road. Absolutely crazy.
Thank you for acknowledging the risks of cars! All the free range bloggers act like irrational stranger danger is the cause of parental caution. No- it's the cars! And it's a legit concern
The number of walkers has been a steep decline since the 1960s. Very few American kids walk anymore. But this was true even in the 1990s. Even crazier is that even school bus riders have been dropping! Hence the huge traffic lines we see at modern schools.
Wow, I have always been a walker, I walk everywhere. I choose places to live based on walkability to get to what I need. I am not trying to sound like my grandparents but heck we walked to school rain or shine. I grew up just under one mile away from school, in a small town granted so all the schools were in a cluster, but we walked to and from daily. If it was really, really, ugly out -- like bordering on a 'snow day' we might, MIGHT get a ride. Sounds like the car pollution problem is actually a lazy humans problem.
If you want kids to be independent btw, maybe change the laws. I used to take the train to school by myself when I was ten. Pretty sure a parent could be charged with neglect in many places in America for letting their ten year old go off on a 30 minute trek by themselves.
Stop helicopter parenting.
Definitely a big part of it. That mom who was arrested for letting her 10 year old boy walk into town recently just illustrates our different culture and legal expectations than when we were growing up.
Truth. I took the public bus from the time I was 10. It was the 80s. I can’t even fathom my mother being arrested for neglect. 🤦♀️
Yep, I watched this trend grow while I was working in the school market. It's ridiculous. I walked and biked to my elementary (our bike racks were FULL of bikes), middle and high school, as well as bussed (winter).
It was fun, and we enjoyed it.
Some of this is because of the simultaneous -national fear campaign about people abducting children, and also - this police state BS whereby it's considered criminal to let you kids outside unattended.
But it's also, helicopter parenting, lazy children (and their lazy children, now adult parents), and the same mobile culture that has people ordering DoorDash for garbage fast food, or Amazon, or whatever... anything for "convenience".
hell, when I was a kid, it was humiliating for your parents to walk you to your bus stop, and/or stay there until you were picked up.
Although, as an aside, a few years ago, I found a toddler, wandering around near a 50 mph road, next to some townhomes. It took me 5 minutes of knocking on doors to find his home and shitbag parents.
There's just too many parts of our culture and society, disintegrating at once, to keep track, or to fix them all in isolation.
Yes, I have seen it in my own communities. Was somewhat rare to be driven to school by a parent back in my parts of Oklahoma, but now has become more normal. Even if we didn't walk or bike, pretty much everyone rode the school bus.
That's pretty crazy about the toddler! I guess it shows you all this stuff is more generalizations. We can spot counter examples all over.
Either way, it's a shame. Riding our bikes home after school, or chatting it up on the school bus, was a lotta fun when you're just a kid, and it was also a place where you could cut loose a little, since we were under pretty tight controls at the actual schoolhouse. Today's kids, like so many things, have no idea what they are missing!
I grew up in northern Canada. We biked to school if there wasn’t too much snow and ice, walked otherwise (no, it wasn’t 5 miles, it was a quarter mile). Below about 30 below zero (F) we were allowed to eat our bag lunch at school (there was no food of any kind served at school). School was canceled at 40 below. Nobody got a ride to school unless they were coming from a dental appointment or something.
The school pick up and drop off lines like this are real. If you’re going to send your kid to public school then put them on a bus. If you won’t put them on the bus, stop proclaiming you’re desire to save the environment while you sit in your idling car.
"stop proclaiming you’re desire to save the environment while you sit in your idling car." Ha, I am imaging a lot of people here in California.
My kid’s school has one bus and it doesn’t stop anywhere near us. No other options :(
Ya, that’s a bummer and something I have heard from a lot of parents. Sorry about that.
When my kids were in K-12, we lived in suburban San Francisco. No sidewalks in our town, particularly in the hills, no school bus service, and no public transit. So we had to drive them to school in the morning before I went to work and arrange for sitters in the afternoons to pick them up at 3:00 p.m. I used to joke (but not really) that our school district was keeping women at home, especially when you also considered the vast amount of volunteerism the school district required. There were no teachers’ aides, no secretaries except for the one assigned to the Principal, and no drivers for class field trips.
Our schools run on the unpaid labor of women. If you totaled up the volunteer man-hours our schools receive and actually assigned a wage to them, the ACTUAL cost of an education would be far higher than what we believe it to be now. I would love to see all the moms who drive and volunteer their time to literally go on strike for a month. The whole system would grind to a halt and maybe, just maybe, we could get the funding we need to run public education effectively. But who am I kidding? Women’s time is not valuable in this society.
This is actually an interesting angle. It forces a parent to basically work part-time, and that often falls on women. It's ironic because we have higher rates of women in the work force than in the 1960s, yet there is now this added burden of getting kids to school (not just on the bus or out the door). Tough for moms.
The school asks for a special millage (like a special tax) that then goes on your property taxes based on how much your house is worth. This then gets put on the ballot for people to vote on. For example, we own an extra parcel of land. For our summer taxes, the state education tax millage is 6. So they take the taxable value of the land (which is approx half of its worth) and multiple by .006 and we pay $73.37. That’s not a lot for a spare piece of land, nor do we pay a ridiculously high amount on our bill for our home property taxes. But we live in a reasonable school district, and I was more than fine voting for special millages for our school district to do some upkeep. My parents live in the district I mentioned. Not only do they pay the normal millage for school operation, but then the school asked for a separate new millage to do all their pie-in-the-sky “improvements.” This millage will be an additional tax for, I believe, 25 years. (If I recall, this new millage increased my parents’ taxes by $500/yr, which is a lot for someone on a fixed income. Also, as the county reassesses property values-generally higher-every year, the extra will continue to be larger every year.) Then the school decided they needed another additional millage because they couldn’t seem to properly budget the 60 million plus they got from that millage. We do not live in an area of great affluence. However, some local elites were quite vocal about voting for the 60+ millage and the teachers were even giving extra credit to students who were eligible to vote if they went to vote in favor of the increase. The second extra millage vote failed, and I doubt they’ll be able to get much more money out of the community, especially as the waste comes to light. Did the football field need astroturf? No. Did the cafeteria need Mongolian BBQ? No. Did they need a food truck for concessions at sporting events? No. The students needed quality teachers.
So it's a parcel tax. OK, got it now. And they misspent the money, according to you. That's fine, but you can't take an anecdotal example and apply it to all school districts around the country. There's a difference between "waste" and misappropriation. The school board should be recalled or voted out. I'd even go so far as to say you probably have a case for a class action lawsuit against the school district.
Millage. Made an error.
I still don't know what that is. A tax of some kind? I tried looking it up but couldn't find anything.
I have no problem with teacher salaries. We live in a town adjacent to where a school system just did a special mileage for over 60 million. (This is the school I attended.) Much of this money that was supposed to “improve” the school (improve apparently included adding a Mongolian BBQ to the cafeteria) actually went to a fancy football field and food truck. Then, within a couple years, they came back with their hands out for more and got soundly rejected by the blue collar people who this town is made up of who couldn’t actually afford the first round that the few elite managed to push through by using voting 18 year old high school students at the polls who will never have to fund any of it.
Sorry, what's a "special mileage"?
How about they actually use their tax dollars wisely instead of taxing more. That’s a good place to start.
Cool. So you're going to pick up/drop off the kids, then? You're going to cut into your work hours to volunteer at school?
I homeschooled my kids. Had they gone to public school, yes, I would have been volunteering. However, they should not need volunteers as they get plenty of tax money. As a taxpayer and a previously publicly educated student myself, I can see there is a lot of waste.
Where, exactly is the waste? In teacher salaries? In program cuts? In providing special ed to those who need it? Please, do go on about the waste in public education.
Nothing becomes more efficient by taking money at gunpoint and filtering it through a series of bureaucracies. How about we start paying our men enough they can support their wives staying home with the children, rather than taxing the men even more so their wives have to work full time at the school?
🙄
These lines are also DANGEROUS.
Fully half of all kids hit by cars and killed and killed by cars driven by other parents driving their kids to school.
Driving our kids to school in giant SUVs and pickup trucks which ALL have poor visibility is insane.
The most dangerous thing is right in the driveway not some imaged stranger. Yep.
It’s the cars! We’re far enough from the school that the kids get to ride the bus. I’ve walked home with my older one a few times, but I wouldn’t let them walk alone. There’s a major highway they have to cross, with a stoplight and crosswalk, but even the school bus drivers aren’t attentive enough to see people in that crosswalk. Their school was built in the 60’s and just last summer the city put a sidewalk along the only road to the school (in a suburban neighborhood, not remote in any way). The way my neighbors drive is too selfishly aggressive to trust them to see my minions. And the trucks these days that have a hood higher than a kid’s head are so dangerous! I hate this car centric approach.
Crazy it took that long for sidewalks! My home town school STILL doesn't have any, so no one walks or bikes at all. It's a shame.
My son asked to bike to high school and I said no, because of the traffic.
That’s a bummer and far too common…
I drove my child because if not, she would be on the bus almost an hour each way. The bus had this weird winding route. And, the bus stop couldn’t be anywhere near my house. They wanted a middle schooler to walk down our street, turn the corner, walk just as far down that street, cross the road & stand on a corner that had a hill & no way to access the side walk other than to walk up the homeowner’s driveway. the bus would pick child up, & then turn down our road driving passed our house. I thought it might get better in high school. Nope. Again the bus stop was a ways away & crossing a street. And, it was another long ride but not quite an hour. Sometimes the bus wouldn’t even show up. After waiting with child at the bus stop in the rain for no bus to show up. I again gave up & drove the 3 miles to school. Driving child to school was an inconvenience but totally worth it!
Yes, I have heard versions of this. I think with cuts to buses, routes have gotten longer and more winding. Hard to blame parents in this case, too. Sitting on the bus over an hour isn’t ideal.
I was on a bus for this long every day for 12 years. Didn't kill me. At all.
Gives a little seasoning to kids!
I am glad you mentioned the hysteria over abductions as a driving factor for the phenomenon of school pickup lines. The data is clear that it is nowhere near the problem that the news and social media make it out to be. For a lack of a better term, abduction is romanticized in American society. The image of an innocent child being snatched up in an instance by an evildoer for insidious purposes is implanted in our minds, yet in actual crime statistics, this is an exceedingly rare occurrence. There's an entire corner of the internet dedicated to uncovering new "methods" people use to kidnap children and women, perpetuating this culture of fear.
Part of the solution to this problem will have to be convincing parents it's safe to let their kids get to school without being driven there, whether by bus, bike, or on foot. I'm worried that this fear will outweigh any attempts to reorganize cities to make the journey to school more feasible on foot, by bike, or with public transit unless it is directly addressed.
Yes, it goes into the idea of "if it bleeds, it leads" in media, that has only been exacerbated by social media and the internet. I don't actually have a good answer, other than trying to bring more attention to the issue. It does make support for public transit, walking, etc more difficult. So it's an up hill battle.
1) I got kicked off the bus for graffiti in 5th grade. Got to ride my bike 2 miles to school.
2) I live in a rural suburb now. No sidewalks. The school is 25 lots away and completely un-walkable or bikable. Dear doge: please return funds to municipalities
That's tough! It sounds like your school was similar to mine in distance and space. No way would I have been allowed to bike. Not sure what my parents would have done if I got kicked off!
Another change I don’t believe was mentioned was school start times. Our school growing up started at 8. If I had lived close enough to walk or bike (we lived in the country and our elementary school was 6 miles crossing a busy highway with no light) then we might have biked occasionally, but as it was, the bus came at 7:30. The school my son is slated to that he attended for one year before we switched to private school began at 7:35am. It’s 4 miles away across a busy highway with no sidewalk, also rural. His morning bus came at 6:37 and we had to walk/drive him to the front of our neighborhood which is 3/4 a mile from the house. You can see why the bus wasn’t desirable when I could drive him in less than 8 minutes almost an hour later than the bus came. These early elementary starts are not for the faint-hearted. In Japan , my sisters’ kids get on their bus that they walk about 1/2 mile (5 months a year of snow) on a country rode and board at 7:40 and get to school for an 8am start. And no phones allowed on the bus for messing around. Different rules make a huge difference.
Interesting. I had not heard anything about starting times yet. Definitely worth a closer look. Thank you for comment. I will look into this for a future post.
Our district has a very expensive fee for students to take the school bus. So of course you’re going to drive your kid—it’s not worth $800 for the school bus.
Ah ok. I guess that’s part of the cuts. Used to be free or baked into taxes for most places back in the day. Another barrier.
I lived across the street from my kids elementary school and they said we were not allowed to walk our child in or out, this was just last year 2024 for reference. I tried to argue but they refused. Ridiculous
That is insane. But Ive heard of similar cases. Just illustrates our collective problem.
Wow, it sounds like rules for a fast food drive-thru.
What was their reason for not allowing this?
They said safety. Because so many people drive (because they are forced to) it makes the parking lot hazardous for walking in. 🙄 I gave up at that point.
WOW. This is insane. I can’t even wrap my mind around this.
Oh my goodness, just had this conversation with the husband yesterday, driving in a school zone and gobsmacked over the number of parents with their perfectly capable and old enough children. And down the road, we learned never to drive by the high school either before or after school because of the pickup and drop off traffic trailing out and blocking the road. Absolutely crazy.
Yep! More and more people are noticing this in our communities. Simply annoying!
How children lost the right to roam in four generations
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html
And even worse since this was written
Thank you for acknowledging the risks of cars! All the free range bloggers act like irrational stranger danger is the cause of parental caution. No- it's the cars! And it's a legit concern
Yes definitely a disconnect. They are legit a danger.
Do children not walk home from school anymore? I realize that society is continuing to devolve but really?
The number of walkers has been a steep decline since the 1960s. Very few American kids walk anymore. But this was true even in the 1990s. Even crazier is that even school bus riders have been dropping! Hence the huge traffic lines we see at modern schools.
Wow, I have always been a walker, I walk everywhere. I choose places to live based on walkability to get to what I need. I am not trying to sound like my grandparents but heck we walked to school rain or shine. I grew up just under one mile away from school, in a small town granted so all the schools were in a cluster, but we walked to and from daily. If it was really, really, ugly out -- like bordering on a 'snow day' we might, MIGHT get a ride. Sounds like the car pollution problem is actually a lazy humans problem.