An Ohio School District is Known for its Walkability. A District Overhaul is Jeopardizing That.

School board officials in Lakewood, Ohio voted to convert an elementary school into a centralized early education center on the grounds that the school was operating at a reduced capacity. However, the change would force students to travel to the school from farther away, “effectively sacrificing” the district’s reputation for walkability.

As Kea Wilson explains in Streetsblog USA, the “small but seismic change” would mean that the district would close some small neighborhood schools on safe routes to direct students elsewhere. 

That “system of social infrastructure,” many Lakewood families argue, is at least partly an outgrowth of the city's history as a streetcar suburb, which left the community with a compact, walkable grid and minimal school parking lots, even after the streetcars stopped running, as well as decades of conscientious district planning that allowed Lakewood to maintain small neighborhoods schools even as family sizes and student enrollment shrunk nationwide.

More importantly, “For families without cars, though, losing access to a walkable school may mean losing access to school, period — a major issue in a district that already struggles with absenteeism.”

According to an analysis from the Natural Resources Defense Council, 23 percent of residents of Ohio’s 11th district belong to households with no cars. “The burden of the decision, of course, will have the most impact on the families within Lincoln's immediate footprint, but parents of multiple children say those challenges will be steep for them, too — especially if one kid is young enough to be shunted to the district's single early learning center while the older one walks to the school around the corner, both at exactly the same drop-off time.”

For Seth Kaplan, author of “Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society One ZIP Code at a Time,” walkable neighborhood systems based in part around schools “aren't fungible educational facilities. They're irreplaceable community anchors.”