Posted on 06/23/2008 6:32:36 AM PDT by Virginia Ridgerunner
Here's how rising fuel prices affect an organization with a fleet of 1,273 school buses: The Montgomery County school board today will consider giving Superintendent Jerry D. Weast emergency powers to make students walk farther to school, if need be, in the coming academic year.
(snip)
Should prices continue to rise, the school system could save money by raising maximum walking distances for students, because more walkers means fewer buses. Currently, elementary school students walk up to a mile, middle school students 1.5 miles and high school students two miles.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Do away with forced busing from one end of the county to the other to ensure integrated schools, and the county wouldn't have this problem.
Walked 2 miles to High School and back for four years in all kinds of weather
(It wasn’t uphill both ways though)
What about in in the snow.....barefoot?
In our day, we walked (ALL TOGETHER NOW...)
5 miles
in the snow
uphill
BOTH WAYS!!!
and...
WE LIKED IT!
WE WERE GRATEFUL FOR IT!!!!!
..... uphill,
..... both ways,
.....
Assuming Maryland issues bonds, I expect this is nothing more than a jaded attempt to guilt-extort school bond funds in an upcoming election.
BFD! Kids are too fat anyway from High-fructose corn syrup, super-size fries and sitting on their lazy butts playing Nintendo.
I can see the problem for city kids. Rural kids and small town could stand the walk like I did.
Or they could blame the stingy tax payers for the problem.
Funny how managing the money you have, is so very hard. And the cuts always seem to specifically hurt the vulnerable children. Why, it almost seems like the schools want to cause pain in order to justify additional levies against the community. Hmmmmmmmmmm.
It took us 20 seconds to hit that reference 4 times. LOL
While carrying your little brother on your back....
Yeah, we’re getting slow!
Exactly! It would do the “little darlings” some good to get off their lard a$$es and walk.
Medical costs in the long run would be lower.
Don’t forget about being barefoot!
A BETTER idea would be to RETURN TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOLS that were the norm when I was a kid.
A large part of the current social madness is the idiotic bussing — at great cost to the citizens and the waste of fuels and consequent CO2 emissions (none of which is mentioned in the conversations surrounding the GLOBAL WARMING SCAM) of these kids to hell (your basic government school!) and back.
That we’ve TOLERATED that particular form of madness says more about US than it does about those who foisted it upon us.
But, of course, as every socialist, double-domed educrat knows, a BLACK KID is simply incapable of learning unless he or she is sitting next to a WHITE KID.
At 4AM!
A fat kid in my neighborhood was a seriously rare thing; walking a mile and a half to school and back every day might have had something to do with it...
Most of us walked to school before forced integration, why we even rode bikes to school.
Part of the fun was walking to and from school. It was good exercise too.
It was a real honor to be a crossing guard at the corners.
Times have sure changed and the liberal answers have created problems that didn’t exist before.
You had feet?
Excellent post. Here in Indy there was an all black highschool years ago. The black community took great pride in it.
It is gone now.
Maybe you got recess too.
That is cut out now.
Re: “liberal answers have created problems that didn’t exist before.”
I assert, and haven’t been offered a viable counter example, that there is no problem we face today that isn’t the result of, or been exacerbated by, some liberal policy.
That being said - you all think it’s great that kids are going to be walking more,
but this is what the left has in store for ALL of us. Their policies are an indirect effort to control your consumption and ability to travel.
Your idea wouldn’t be so bad if the fat bureaucrats who take all the dough were walking too? Or how bout the good old days when you could walk to school somewhat safely without porn-fueled middle aged men looking to score with a kid?
That should have been good, except I found myself wandering off like I did when my teachers showed me a film in class.
:o)
Your idea wouldn’t be so bad if the fat bureaucrats who take all the dough were walking too? Or how bout the good old days when you could walk to school somewhat safely without porn-fueled middle aged men looking to score with a kid?
********************************
Yep. My kids wouldn’t walk to school like I did, never.
I walked through a patch of woods to get to the road to walk to school. At 9, I was in charge of four or five of the younger ones in the complex and delivered them to their doors.
Not that we didn’t have serial killers back then, but it certainly wasn’t like what it is today. And people actually got involved when they saw someone struggling with a child. Quizzed them at least. Once my daughter was pitching a tantrum in a store and I carried her out kicking and screaming. It ran through my mind, why isn’t anyone stopping me?
The issue is not having kids walk to school (which I have no problem with in a NORMAL SAFE ENVIRONMENT, which Montgomery County most assuredly is NOT), but the fact that Montgomery County is targeting them (and their safety make their parents howl and accept new taxes, when cutting its bloated administration should be the first thing done.
He ain’t heavy,he’s my brother.
I agree MrB on what the left has in mind.
They want to control our travel and communication.
Why is it that so many people are blind to that?
That said, I still have good memories of walking to school:)
My kids Dad used to tell them how far he had to walk to school when he was a kid. They always added.......barefoot.
Attention Deficit Disorder is SUCH a tragic thing.
Now take your RITILIN and lie down.
Today in my neck of the woods, they pay adults to cross the kids.....whatever happened to older kids doing it?? I remember we did think it was an honor to be a cross guard.
Never could convince my kids I walked for miles, uphill both way, in the snow.
They just didn’t buy into the concept of snow at all.
Attention Deficit Disorder is SUCH a tragic thing.
Now take your RITILIN and lie down.
****************************
Dangit. Called out again.
I live in Montgomery County. It has a lot of sidewalks and a lot of busy streets. A child ten or up with common sense could handle walking through most of the County. I wouldn’t want the young kids out, though.
Then again, my philosophy of parenting is “if you let your kid going walking alone outside, you have a 1 in a 100,000 chance that he or she will be abducted by some freak. If you keep your child locked inside all the time, you have about a 90 percent chance he or she will grow up to be a fat dull person. Go with the odds.”
Same here, and it didn't kill me. We didn't have a car, and if we went anywhere, we walked or we took the bus.
Funny thing. I see buses bound to and from the high school half full. By junior year, a lot of kids are driving to school and taking several friends with them, so buses are not full by any means. At least that’s the case in our school district. Maybe they should do a better job of calculating how many kids will be taking the bus and drive smaller buses.
My kids used to walk the 1/4 mile to and from their school, but now the bus picks up kids near me due to safety concerns.
Depends on where you’re at, I guess. I work down in the seedy part of Rockville (near the Metro) where there are few sidewalks and many shady looking characters that I wouldn’t want my kid to go anywhere near.
“Here in Indy there was an all black highschool years ago. The black community took great pride in it.”
.....when I went to high school in Maryland there were three schools in town: White, Black and Catholic....the Black one still stands and it’s graduates still hold reunions there....it’s used as a cultural center now days....I gave them a donation....I think whites and blacks of my generation got along better....whites are afraid of young blacks today because of gang violence.
The horror!
At age 11 I was screwing up big time in class so my parents took my bike away and made me walk 2 miles to school and back each day. For the next month I walked one block over to my friend’s house, ate breakfast there then rode on his handlebars to and from school. A great memory!
Yep, the cool guys were crossing guards. You know back then so many kids walked that walk 2 times a day, it would have been hard for a pervert to grab a kid.
Seems most of our worst problems have been created. I guess I am like every adult that thinks back to how much better life was. Truth is, it really was.
Sometimes I can shut my eyes and remember smells, and even small moments that could be thought of as irrelevant. LOL
Oh, and have the black kids stopped picking on the Asian kids, making racial slurs and otherwise abusing them there?
Yes, my favorite -- are the predominantly black juries pulling OJ decisions, i.e., letting a black criminal go free because he's black, despite the fact that the victim is also black -- she's often your mother, your cousin, your sister, etc., but she's obviously invisible to these juries.
Ah, memories of Prince Georges' County.
TOUCHE!
I WAS going to comment on that in the post but was interrupted.
This could be true. I would also ad that back then the Democrats and the people like Sharpton and Jackson were not constantly driving a wedge between the races. They actually have set back the dreams of MLK.
I worked with a lot of youngsters between 16-22 years old. The white kids resent the race card being used all the time. They would actually say it. It wasn't that they saw blacks as lesser than them, they just resented them using the race card and guilt to manipulate things.
Grew up in Montgomery County and never rode the bus to school. Walked in elementary and junior high and drove in high school.
And that leads to my idea. Ban high school students from driving to school and charge each student $20 a month to ride the bus. Yeah, people will piss an moan but just say it will reduced their carbon footprint and save mom earth and they’ll go for it.
Just think of the reduced traffic in the mornings!!
Here’s an idea. It fights the bugaboos of greenhouse emissions, saves fuel, fights childhood obesity, and makes everyone equal.
Set up 4 parking lots at the cardinal compass points from the schools at the distances noted above. Have the buses stop there and drop off all the kids. Let ALL the kids walk from there to school.
I am a genius. It’ll fix some of the clothing problems we have (you’re not going to walk to school in cold weather in some of the clothing I see the kids wear) (not to mention the ridiculous shoes). It makes sure that no kid is “privileged” over another, fulfilling another leftist mantra. And it’ll expose Mom and Dad’s princes and princesses to a bit of real life.
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