The Nashville City Paper is reporting on a new walk-to-school program that is going to be tried at Eakin Elementary. I attended Eakin for gradeschool in the 1980’s. Starting in third grade I used to ride my bike to school with some friends (Seth and Nash mostly). We didn’t need a "program" designed to target obesity. All we needed was parental permission and a little competitive spirit (we pseudo raced most days).
I do think this program is a good idea. I am probably still reaping the health rewards of riding my bike to school as a kid. This is also a good way to spur community development. In actuality this probably has less to do with helping kids’ health and more to do with helping parents’ property values.
The money that is being spent for this program is going to fixing sidewalks (I thought the Mayor was making that his pet project anyway), adding pedestrian signs, cleaning up side streets, etc. There were alot of broken sidewalks when we rode our bikes to school, they didn’t stop us from being healthy (actually we loved broken sidewalks and used them as ‘jumps). Ther are better ways to spend money if the goal is healthy kids (more healthy lunches, better athletic equipment, funding after-school sports programs for gradeschoolers, etc).
I am not going to complain too loud though. The program is going to expand to East Nashville this Fall (yay for my property value). I don’t think the program will be very successful at helping unhealthy kids to become healthy, unless there is some trickle-down effect of kids’ being healthy as a result of parents’ property values increasing.
