Montreal City Weblog

Kate 11:25 on 2021-02-13 Permalink Reply  

• JP 13:56 on 2021-02-13 Permalink

  They should and need to boost road safety everywhere all around…

• Kate 17:26 on 2021-02-13 Permalink

  Yes, but around schools, where small people are being loaded and unloaded into vehicles, I can see that it’s a bit more pressing.

• Chris 17:38 on 2021-02-13 Permalink

  And ironic since it’s those very vehicles that cause the problems.

• Kate 17:59 on 2021-02-13 Permalink

  I think the days when most kids lived within easy walking distance of school are long gone. Many kids go to specially chosen schools that aren’t close to home, and – yes, irony – even when the school is nearby, parents don’t feel it’s safe for kids to walk, causing, as you say, the very problem they’re trying to avoid.

  My little sister got hit by a car on her way to school one morning, in fact, on foot. She was more or less OK, being wrapped up in winter clothing and boots at the time, but you can see how thinking about this kind of thing shakes a parent up.

• Kevin 10:45 on 2021-02-14 Permalink

  The main issue is that many children are at school long before busses arrive and classes start. It’s normal for a parent to drop off their child at 7 am or pick up at 6.

• Kate 11:23 on 2021-02-14 Permalink

  So it’s still dark out?

  7 a.m., man, that’s brutal. I am not a morning person, and it was always a huge effort to get out of bed and off to school for a 9 a.m. start. (It’s why my sister was on her way to school without me, that day. I simply wasn’t ready to leave yet.)

  Are kids in school now from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.?

• walkerp 11:34 on 2021-02-14 Permalink

  Kate, I’m not sure that is the case for elementary schools. Only speaking anecdotally for our own in the Plateau but the majority of kids arrive on foot and live in the neighbourhood.

• Mark Côté 11:34 on 2021-02-14 Permalink

  School daycares open at 7 am and close at 6 pm to provide flexibility to parents. I doubt very many, if any, are there for the full 11 hours but there are definitely some who spend 8-9 hours at school.

  School itself starts at 8 or 9 and ends between 2:30 and 3:30, depending on the school (actually possibly even a bit later now due to the province having required a second recess a couple years ago). My daughter switched schools from one that started at 9 to one that started at 8, and while she is a morning person and doesn’t really mind, I certainly don’t enjoy having to get up before 7 to get everything ready.

• Mark Côté 11:37 on 2021-02-14 Permalink

  Also I am pretty sure most kids do go to nearby schools. That’s the default, anyway, and you can only go to another school if there is room, which is becoming rarer and rarer. There are a handful of specialized schools, however, that don’t provide any transportation and take kids from all over (so-called “240 schools”).

• Kate 11:49 on 2021-02-14 Permalink

  Thanks all for clarifications. Most of the people I know who had kids sent them to FACE, regardless where they lived.

  When I was a kid, brought up in a Catholic family, there was an inevitability that if you were in the parish of Saint X church, any kids went to the closely adjoining Saint X school: Quebec had begun the gradual process of divorcing education and religion, but that didn’t become final till the 1990s.

• Mark Côté 12:11 on 2021-02-14 Permalink

  Yeah FACE is one of those 240 status schools, along with MIND, Royal Vale, and Vincent Massey. In theory most kids at other schools should either live within walking distance or be bussed (at least in elementary), but the latter only works for families who don’t need daycare.

• walkerp 13:39 on 2021-02-14 Permalink

  FACE is the anglo-bourgeois social class anxiety school.

  Mark Côté, we’ve adjusted but that first shift from school starting at 9 in maternelle to 8 in première année was quite rough!

• Blork 13:49 on 2021-02-14 Permalink

  I grew up in a small city on the edge of the earth where the idea of being driven to school was unheard of. We had to walk five miles uphill in a snowstorm to get to school and six miles uphill through lava fields to get home. At least that’s how it felt. Thanks to Google Maps and its measuring tool I just determined how long those walks actually were:

  Elementary school: 550 metres each way.
  Junior High: 800 metres each way.
  High School: 700 metres each way.

  (For the spatial-positioning impaired, 600 metres is roughly the distance from the Mont-Royal Metro station to Boul. St-Laurent.)

  Incidentally, throughout my entire schooling I walked home for lunch every day.

  Tangential, but worth mentioning. Years ago I wrote blog posts for a telecom company that was pushing parental controls for mobile phones. I had a certain amount of free reign, so I’d write about safety and parenting in general sometimes, including a post based on an interview I heard with Matt Hern, author of “Watch Yourself; Why Safer Isn’t Always Better.” In the interview he talked about how parents were driving their kids to school more and more because of fears of child abductions. My paraphrasing of his comments, as I wrote on that blog, basically define the times we live in, in terms of how our perceptions are shaped by media. I wrote:

  On the surface, it’s a perfectly reasonable source of worry; few things are as terrifying and tragic as the abduction of a child. But Hern points out that although such abductions garner immense media attention when they happen, the truth is they really don’t happen very often. On the other hand, children are injured or killed every day in automobile accidents.

  So if parents decide to drive their children to and from school every day for safety, they are in fact engaging in a high risk activity for the sake of avoiding a low risk activity.

• Kate 15:56 on 2021-02-14 Permalink

  My first grade school was 350m, mostly via an alley, and very safe. My second (ages 10 till 12) was 550m, but involved crossing Decarie, and this was where my sister got hit: I had some close calls but always managed to get across safely. We always came home for lunch from grade school, too, so that was 4 crossings of the Decarie trench per day.

  High school also involved this crossing but was 2km away, so I didn’t come home at lunchtime.