The 6 E’s of Safe Routes to School

All Safe Routes to School initiatives should begin by listening to students, families, teachers, and school leaders. Authentic, ongoing engagement ensures programs are created with the community, not just for it.

When people feel heard, programs become more welcoming and relevant to students and families from all backgrounds. Involving community members early builds local champions, stronger support, and a shared sense of responsibility. Strong engagement builds trust, encourages collaboration, and leads to lasting, positive change.

• Let’s Get Together Guide: Offers tips and strategies for engaging communities as you work together to make meaningful change
• Community Engagement Cards: Creative, arts-based activities to gather input and build a community vision for safe routes
• A Place-It Guide for Safe Routes to School: A hands-on engagement method to involve students, parents, staff, and teachers

Safe Routes to School initiatives benefit all demographic groups, with particular attention to ensuring safe, healthy, and fair outcomes for students with disabilities, low-income students, students of color, students of all genders, students whose families speak a language other than English, homeless students, and other demographic groups.

• At the Intersection of Active Transportation and Equity: Joining Forces to Make Streets Healthier and Fairer: This report explores the complexities of equitable active transportation and the issues that arise at the junction of efforts to advance walking and bicycling and work to increase health, fairness, and opportunity for low-income communities and communities of color.
• Engaging Students with Disabilities in Safe Routes to School: An infobrief that provides information for Safe Routes to School staff, volunteers, or program leaders on how to plan and develop a program that considers and meets the needs of students with disabilities.

What do we mean by equity?

Equity recognizes that different people have different barriers to living healthy, fulfilled lives. To help people get to the same outcome, we need to understand the different barriers and opportunities that affect different groups and craft our approach with those challenges and needs in mind. Equity addresses the power imbalances and the lived differences that create different health, educational, and career outcomes for different people, differences that often emerge along lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, and disability.

Equity is different from equality.

Equality can be understood as giving everyone the same thing, while equity means ensuring each person has access to what they need to thrive. For example, equality has been described as giving everyone a pair of shoes, while equity is making sure they have shoes that fit.

Read more about the Safe Routes Partnership’s commitment to equity

What does it mean to include equity in Safe Routes to School?

To help address inequities and increase service in low-income and communities of color, the Safe Routes to School program prioritizes Equity as one of its 6 E's. Equity needs to be built into each aspect of a comprehensive Safe Routes to School initiative, meaning that each E needs to include equity in its analysis and action items. But equity also needs to be considered separately to ensure that the overall effects of individual steps are adding up to a meaningful and sufficient investment in the safety and health of low-income students, students of color, and others.

Teaching students and community members the skills to walk and bike safely, while also helping them understand the benefits of walking and biking.

Programs often include fun, hands-on lessons in and out of the classroom. Younger kids can learn important basics on how to cross the street and watch for cars. Older students can practice bike skills like how to balance, signal turns, follow traffic rules, and wear a helmet properly.

Programs often share tips with drivers too, reminding everyone to slow down and stay alert in school zones and neighborhoods.

• Roll Bicycle Education Into Your Physical Education Program:: This fact sheet explains the why and the how of integrating bicycle education into physical education programs.
• Bicycle and Pedestrian Curricula Guide: A guide to bicycle and pedestrian education for students.
• A bicycle skills clinic also called a bike rodeo, offers a chance for elementary school students and their families to learn and practice bike handling skills in a fun, safe, and encouraging atmosphere.

One of the best ways to get students walking and biking is to make it fun! Events, challenges, and group walking and biking build excitement around biking and walking to and from school.

Low-cost and easy to organize, activities like Walk to School Day, bike trains, and walking school buses bring students, families, and school staff together. Fun competitions and small incentives keep students motivated and participation growing.

• Bike & Roll Day Toolkit: Step-by-step guide for planning a successful event
• Walking School Buses and Bike Trains: Learn to organize ongoing programs that offer supervised and safe travel to/from school
• Ruby Bridges Walk to School Day honors the living legacy of civil rights activist Ruby Bridges. Every November 14th, we celebrate Ruby’s courageous and historic act by encouraging students to walk to school and engaging in a day of dialogue about activism, anti-racism, and anti-bullying.

Making physical improvements to streets and neighborhoods that make walking and biking safer, more comfortable, and more convenient.

A great way to begin is with a community assessment. For example, students, families, school staff, and city transportation staff can conduct a walk or bike audit to identify barriers to walking and biking to school. By involving families, transportation staff, and the school district, communities can gather meaningful feedback, prioritize improvements, and work together toward practical, lasting solutions.

• Engineering Solutions Guide for Safe Routes to School: Features 17 fact sheets on engineering solutions’ key features, estimated costs, safety considerations, safety outcomes and opportunities for public art in rural, suburban and urban routes to school
• Let’s Go for a Walk: A Toolkit for Planning and Conducting a Walk Audit: This toolkit gives you the information and tools to hold your own walk audit that will help you achieve the goals of your community. Includes a sample one-page school neighborhood walk audit and a sample general walk audit checklist.
• Keep Calm and Carry On to School: Improving Arrival and Dismissal for Walking and Biking: This infobrief provides information on how schools, districts, cities and counties, and community partners can address arrival and dismissal in developing school travel plans.

Evaluation helps determine which strategies work, ensures equity, and uncovers areas for improvement in Safe Routes to School programs.

Programs can use simple, low-cost methods like family and student surveys to understand travel behavior and attitudes. In-class travel tallies conducted once or twice a year help track how students travel to/from school and any changes over time.

Consistent evaluation informs better planning and is the foundation of a responsive Safe Routes to School program that meets the needs of students and the community.

E is for Evaluation: Using Data to Tell Your Safe Routes Story: This recorded webinar presentation reviews a variety of ways to measure the success of a program.