When it comes to living green and promoting a healthier lifestyle for families at San Francisco’s Longfellow Elementary, Jacquie Zapata-Chavez doesn’t just talk the talk, she walks the walk. Every Wednesday, the former PTA president leads a convoy of students and their parents on foot throughout a one-mile route to school. The “walking school bus” doesn’t have doors or produce any emissions, and children and their parents happily hop on board together.
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“We have about 100 walkers so we command attention when we walk,” Zapata-Chavez says. The group meets at a fast-food restaurant parking lot around 8 a.m., but students eat fresh organic fruit donated by the school’s nutritionist. “Then we do stretches to music while we wait for walkers, and at 8:20 we start to walk and pick up students along the way,” she explains. Throughout the hike, the group chants “Longfellow What? Walks!”
Zapata-Chavez took on “bus duty” in 2009 when the principal asked her to be a traffic safety coordinator to help ease the congestion at drop-off. “We had cars double-parked, triple-parked, parents yelling at each other, kids crossing in the middle of the street....It was just awful,” she recalls. Zapata-Chavez learned about the National Center for Safe Routes to School and won a grant from the organization to start a walking school bus program.
The weekly walk has earned the school some positive attention. Local officials, including former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and a state senator, have climbed on board Longfellow’s walking school bus. The school won a $10,000 NFL Play 60 grant and an equipment donation and was visited by a few Oakland Raiders players last fall. But the best outcome of the walking school bus so far? “Not only are we fighting obesity, global warming, and traffic,” Zapata-Chavez says, “but we are teaching our children to be good neighbors and citizens of the community and planet!”