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- Implementing SRTS: The 6 Es
Implementing SRTS: The 6 Es
Jeffco Safe Routes to School (SRTS) relies on a variety of activities, programs and resources that can be customized by local champions — students, parents, school staff and administrators — to best fit the need of individual schools and the local community. Safe Routes to School efforts are most successful when they incorporate the 6 Es: Education, Encouragement, Enforcement, Engineering, Evaluation and Equity.3,4,5
Note: Before getting started with any of these activities, we highly recommend that you communicate with your school principal, School Wellness Team, PTA and/or Accountability Committee. It is important to identify what work has already been done and to see if any of these partners might be interested in getting involved in SRTS work as well!
Education is a key component of a successful SRTS program. Activities can include school-based education as well as activities that are provided before and after school and in the community. Education activities can focus on teaching pedestrian, bicyclist and traffic safety skills, or creating awareness of the benefits and goals of SRTS.
While educating students about safe pedestrian and cycling behaviors is key, it can be equally if not more impactful to direct education efforts towards parents and community members who also impact the school zone as a pedestrian, cyclist or motorist. Educating adults on how to drive safely within school zones can benefit all individuals walking or wheeling in a school zone.
Don’t forget the needs of children and adults who do not speak English as a first language; individuals with vision, hearing or mobility impairments; and families across all income levels. Also, any time a change is made to the built environment (i.e., engineering), an education component should be included to educate students, parents and community members about the change.
Encouragement strategies generate excitement about walking and wheeling to and from school. They are important to incorporate into your SRTS program because they can be provided at low or no cost and can jump-start a community’s and/or school’s interest in walking and wheeling.
Special events, such as Walk to School Day (typically held in October) and Bike to School Day (typically held in May), can create an air of excitement and celebration around walking and wheeling to school. Contests and mileage clubs increase walking and wheeling by making it fun and rewarding students for using active transportation to and from school.
Ongoing activities held throughout the year such as Walk and Wheel Wednesdays, walking school buses, bike trains and remote drop-off options give more children the opportunity to make walking or wheeling to school a regular practice.
Click on the resources below for more information on these encouragement activities. Incentive items that reward students for participating in walking and wheeling activities often help motivate students to get started and can be an important encouragement strategy. These don’t have to be expensive or excessive; great results have been achieved by providing items as simple as stickers or pencils!
- Walk & Bike to School Day
- Step by Step: How to Start a Walking School Bus at Your School
- Bicycling to School Together: A Bike Train Planning Guide
- Bicycle Rodeo – Train the Trainer
- Bicycle Colorado – How to Start a Remote Drop-Off Program
- Get Out & Get Moving – Opportunities to Walk to School through Remote Drop-Off Programs
The built environment can pose major challenges to students safely walking and wheeling to school. Through engineering and design projects, we can create safer, more connected spaces for pedestrians, cyclists and motorists.
Engineering efforts can include both low-cost measures (e.g., crosswalk markings, signage and pavement striping) as well as higher-cost capital measures (e.g., sidewalk construction, reconstruction of street crossings and roadway widening to accommodate bicycle and/or pedestrian facilities).
Evaluation tools (such as the Student Travel Tally and the Parent Survey listed under “Evaluation”) can provide helpful insight in determining how many students are actually walking and wheeling to school, as well as what parents’ major concerns are around allowing their students to use active transportation getting to and from school. Walking and wheeling audits (also listed under “Evaluation”) are another evaluation tool that can assist in assessing the environmental conditions around a school that affect walking and bicycling.
Reach out to your local traffic engineer or city planner to gain invaluable information to help brainstorm some feasible solutions or next steps.
Enforcement includes strategies that can help to encourage all road users — drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists — to obey traffic laws and share the road safely.
Enforcement activities can involve teaching pedestrians and bicyclists to walk and wheel safely and pay attention to their environment, such as establishing a crossing guard program. It can also pertain to enforcement of policies and rules that encourage walking and wheeling to and from school. Other enforcement activities could involve ways to encourage safe driving behavior around schools, such as with radar speed signs or signage encouraging cautious driving around schools.
- Crossing Guard Training Program
- Jeffco Public Schools – Crossing Guard Program
- Student Safety Patrol Program
- School Resource Officers: The School Resource Officer (SRO) program is a proactive partnership with local law enforcement agencies to ensure schools remain safe. SROs are generously funded by municipalities or Jefferson County, assigned to district schools and work in concert with the district’s security team members. These officers provide a positive law enforcement presence in the school community and the uniformed officers help deter illegal activity, act as a positive role model to students and build relationships with our school communities. To learn more about the SRO for your school and ways to potentially engage them in SRTS activities, connect with your school leadership.
Every SRTS program, no matter the size, can benefit from evaluation. While evaluation is often only considered once a program has started, it is important to discuss evaluation before designing your SRTS program.
Evaluation can help in identifying underlying issues or barriers and ensuring appropriate solutions are selected; setting reasonable expectations about what the program will do; identifying changes that will improve the program and determining if the program is having the desired results.
Some of the key data collection tools for any Safe Routes to School program are outlined in the resources below.
- Safe Routes to Schools Online Guide - Evaluation
- Safe Routes to Schools Data System
- SRTS Parent Surveys (English, Spanish &Other Languages)
- SRTS Student Travel Tallies
- Walking/Wheeling Audits: Walk and/or wheel audits, sometimes called assessments, are another set of evaluation tools that can be useful in gathering data on environmental conditions that affect walking and wheeling. Audits might focus on a school site, a corridor popular for bicycling or an intersection that residents find daunting. Walk/wheel audits are tools that provide community members (parents, children, school staff, public works or traffic department staff, local engineers or planners, and law enforcement) with the information they need to effectively analyze the design and condition of the transportation network. Audits are typically performed by personnel with experience in pedestrian and bicycle issues, such as local planners and engineers. We highly recommend that you connect with your city’s transportation, planning or engineering office if you are interested in conducting a walk and/or wheel audit for your school. Numerous walk and wheel audit tools exist, and they can vary in the scope and scale of data they collect; determining which type of audit tool is most appropriate will depend on the audit participants, data needs
and available resources. If you would like to see examples of what walk and wheel audit tools look like, the Pedestrian & Bicycle Information Center[external link] has simple tools you can review.
In establishing SRTS efforts, it is important to ensure that activities support safe, active and healthy opportunities for all students — regardless of income, race/ethnicity or physical ability.
Look through SRTS efforts through an equity lens — What barriers do certain groups face in terms of safely walking or wheeling to school? Have you gathered input from the communities that are most greatly impacted by lack of safe pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure or resources? How can we ensure that our SRTS efforts create access and equitable outcomes for all?
- Implementing Safe Routes to School in Low-Income Schools and Communities: A Resource Guide for Volunteers and Professionals
- At the Intersection of Active Transportation and Equity
- Equity Atlases: How Data and Maps Can Illuminate Transportation and Equity
- Fight for Equitable Transportation and Why It Matters
Helpful Definitions
- Bike Rodeo: A bicycle riding event which provides an opportunity for students to learn and practice the skills to bicycle safely. This can include education on rules of the road, training on basic bicycle maintenance and opportunities to practice skills in a safe, off-street bicycle course.
- Bike Trains: A variation on the walking school bus (see below) in which adults supervise a group of children riding their bikes to school.
- Remote Drop-Off: An established, safe and convenient location off school property for parents to drop off and pick up their children in order to ease the burden of traffic on and around school property.
- SRTS Parent Survey: Can be administered online or printed. This survey asks for information about what factors affect whether parents allow their children to walk or wheel to school, the presence of key safety-related conditions along routes to school and related background information. The survey results will help determine how to improve opportunities for children to walk or wheel to school, and measure parental attitude changes as local SRTS programs occur.
- SRTS Student Tally: Can also be administered online or printed. This form will help measure how students get to school and whether the SRTS program affects trips to and from school. Teachers can use this form to record specific information about how children arrive and depart from school each day for a week. The information this form helps collect will be used to help establish a baseline as well as track the success of SRTS programs.
- Walk and Wheel Wednesdays: A scheduled day of the week on which students are encouraged to walk or wheel to school.
- Walking School Bus: A group of children walking to school with one or more adults. It can be as informal as two families taking turns walking their children to school, or as structured as a route with meeting points, a timetable and a regularly rotated schedule of trained volunteers.