Walk to School Month

This is Walk to School Month, and Oct. 4 (tomorrow) is Walk to School Day. Various groups hope to encourage physical fitness in our youth by encouraging more of them to walk to school rather than ride a car or bus.

Like that's going to happen in West Virginia.

Luckily, the Centers for Disease Control has published a short article on barriers to walking to school. Being the geek that I am, I found some interesting numbers in it. The CDC recognizes that kids tend to live farther from school now than they used to, mainly because of school consolidation.

Between 1968 and 2001, the number of schools decreased by about 1,000 (70,879 to 69,697) while the number of students increased by more than 2 million, according to the CDC.In 1969, about 33 percent of students lived more than three miles from their schools. In 2001, about 50 percent did.

In my kids' case, it's not so much distance as it is the roads. My youngest lives about three miles or so from his school. That's three miles of country road. The more heavily traveled parts have no berm.

Kids living along some of the main roads don't have it any better. Check out the berms along Route 10 south of Huntington High School, for example.

I walked home from school once. It was my junior year, I think. It was about six and a half miles. Why? Because no one I knew had done it. (It's a guy thing).

I tried it once more, on the last day of school that same year. I got about two-thirds of the way home before I accepted a ride.