Indiana INDOT Irony

Evidently today is International Walk to School Day and INDOT is encouraging Hoosier children to heed the call and walk to school. The idea is to promote physical activity in our youth and decrease traffic congestion among other things.

I see two problems with this. 1) it is still dark across much of the Hoosier state when kids would be walking to school-thank you very much daylight savings time! I guess it's a good thing the day doesn't fall any later in the year. This all seems contrary to promoting physical health for our kids.

The other problem with walking to school is one created by the state too. My understanding is that school corporations are required to have a minimum number of acres when constructing a new school that essentially removes the building from walkable neighborhoods. Then school corporations, in order to maximize assistance dollars, draw bizarre district boundaries for their schools not regarding neighborhoods, but to enable them to capture a disproportionate number of low income kids to upper income kids. Seems like this only encourages more driving-therefore traffic congestion!

In a recent school building and redistricting project in our community-this very thing happened. In fact, we can physically see our old neighborhood school at the end of our street, about 7 blocks away; but our children attend a new school about 1 1/2 miles away-no way to walk to that one. It split our proud neighborhood in half.

So I'm sorry, INDOT, our kids couldn't possibly walk to school today-like a high majority of other Hoosier children. It is disingenuous to make charges like this. Don't throw traffic congestion and "Get in Shape Indiana" hogwash our way until the state starts "walking" the talk.