Fishbein: Student safety is everybody’s job

Fishbein: Student safety is everybody’s job
Friday, October 25, 2013
By DANIEL FISHBEIN
COLUMNIST

October is “walk-to-school” month, a great reminder that we still have a few beautiful days to enjoy the outdoors before the onset of winter. But rather than designating a four-week period to encourage our students to hoof it to our buildings, I’d prefer to emphasize the benefits of walking throughout the school year and to encourage our community to make it a best practice year-round.

Among its many health benefits, walking provides our students an important outlet to burn up their excess energy. It also helps to alleviate some vehicular traffic in the village. One simple and fun way to encourage walking is to look for, or help organize, an adult-supervised walking school bus in your neighborhood, whereby children wait at a designated stop along the way to school, then join in the stroll to school with a group of their classmates.

It’s also important that we encourage our children to adopt good walking habits and to learn to be responsible pedestrians by using the crosswalks, looking both ways, and stopping to look and wave before stepping off the curb. We can help our children with this process by modeling good pedestrian behavior ourselves.

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