According to Google Maps, my elementary was only 0.8 miles by road from our house. But is was in a semi-rural area, along busy roads with no sidewalks, so walking wouldn’t have been safe, so I rode the school bus. Our subdivision was right behind the school, so cutting through the woods around the block from our house would have been shorter and avoided the busy roads (and I think I a few neighbor kids did just that), but my parents didn’t want us to do that for some reason. Maybe because walking to school was officially not allowed by the school administration and my parents were sticklers for following the rules.
Middle school was farther away so walking wouldn’t have been a realistic option, and I continued to ride the bus. High school even farther, 15 miles according to Google. That made for a ridiculously long bus ride due to the route the bus took and the number of stops it made. I was so glad when I was was old enough to drive myself.
Oh, and snow? This was the South. School got cancelled where there was even the slightest chance of snow in the forecast.
It was around three furlongs, depending on which way I went. Usually cut through the yard of the neighbor behind which took off a hundred yards (and most of a short hill). In HS, there wae a change in living arrangements which had me walking about the same distance for the first year, then taking the city bus for the next three. As for snow, we would have about 5 days of snow a year, and three of them tended to happen over christmas break.
I lived about half a mile away from my elementary school.
Snow we had. I remember the winter of 1959-60 when we got 160 inches. I remember it particularly because the snow was piled on both sides of the sidewalk higher than my head. I felt like I was walking through a tunnel both ways.
The cliche used to be that old people exaggerated about how awful their winters were. Now it’s absolute truth. Winters are literally never as bad as they used to be in the 50s and 60s.
To get to high school, I had to go up a steep hill. To be fair, I was taking the bus, so I didn’t have to put any work into it… except sometimes in winter the hill got too slippery and the bus couldn’t climb it, so we had to walk up the hill on the sidewalk, with high snow. (Climate change: we don’t get such high snow anymore. Although it still gets cold.)
Google says I had to walk 1.3 km but I’m pretty sure I didn’t get the “get off the bus point” right since I’m running on decades-old memories. Or maybe 1.3 km feels different when you’re doing it uphill
I lived 2/5ths of a mile from school, grades 1-6. After about halfway through third grade, I usually rode my bike. One year I rode the bus. That was a real waste.
7-11, I rode the bus. School was about three miles away. My walk to the bus stop was two tenths of a mile, from 7th grade to halfway through 11th when they changed the routes. Then I had to walk a quarter mile to the other end of the street to stay on the same bus. I drove my senior year.
My senior year I only took four classes. There was a teacher’s strike for the first two weeks, so I only had one class I had to worry about for those two weeks since that teacher stayed in the classroom. It was also 1978, so the two full weeks we got out due to the blizzard was awesome!
From age five to nine I walked a mile to school. Then four years of buses followed by a two mile bike or walk to high school. In university the walk was usually just under a mile, except for a few years which needed buses or a car. No big hills, but usually lots of snow and cold temperatures in Canadian winters.
If we are into school closures, there was a fire at the elementary school before I began first grade, and I fervently hoped the whole joint would go up in flames. It was the same building where in 5th grade, guys stood on each other’s shoulders to peer through a window to see the sex ed films the girls saw in 5th grade, and we had to wait until 6th.
Grade school was 3/8 mile. Was a crossing guard at the one busy street - Belmont in Chicago. High school, walked 1/2 mile to Addison and took the CTA bus.
Elementary school, took the bus, and the stop was only half a block from my house. Junior high, school was 1 mile away. The snow wasn’t so bad; it was the frigid weather that was rough, as we girls could not wear pants to school, and it was the era of the miniskirt (and no, we couldn’t change into or out of pants at school). High school, the bus stop was about 1/4 mile from home, but Something Very Bad happened to me en route one day, so I got switched to a different stop.
Google maps tells me it was a 1/2 mile walk from home to my K-4 elementary school, and we went over a hill so it was in fact uphill both ways.
Fifth grade was a little over a mile away; I usually got a ride to school but walked home.
6th-12th I went to school across town; bused until I had a VW Beetle, which I needed to do tennis practice after school in high school.
Undergrad I was usually on campus but about half a mile away from most of the classroom buildings, so I got a lot of walking in. Grad school I biked, anywhere from 1 1/2 to 4 miles.
Actually they were the worst. I think it was the end of January. A foot of snow one weekend. Schools never closed but that’s a lot of snow piled up. Then the next weekend - a two-foot snowfall. Nothing moved in the city for days. It was literally the only time the schools shut down during my 12 years of winter walking.
In Colorado Springs, I walked a mile uphill sometimes in the snow to get to elementary school. The trip home was much easier and a lot more fun. In Germany, I walked in the snow but had to go out of my way to find a hill.
Hey, that was me. I did crossing guard duty for two or three years, with that over-the-shoulders belt that had the cup thing to rest the base of the stop flag in. When we were assigned to the 45th St crossing, we always hoped the city bus would come over the rise when someone was there to cross so that we could stop it.
I guess they mostly use adults for that these days.
Me, too! I went to Towson Elementary School, which is now, ironically, a senior center.
Well, that’s where the similarities end. Our walk was 1.1 miles and we had to cross lots of streets, including one very busy one, York Road, at about the location shown. (However, it was long before that four-lane cross-street, Towsontown Blvd., was there.) I probably often walked with my sister, after she was old enough to go there, and maybe with other neighborhood kids sometimes, although I don’t have any definite recollections of doing so. I also don’t remember walking in the snow, but neither do I recall my mother driving us very often. I guess she must have, if it was really bad out. (I definitely remember the blizzard of '66!)
I took a bus to Dumbarton Junior High school for two years, and after that we moved to Columbia, where I rode a bus out to Glenelg High School for two years and walked to Wilde Lake High School – a little less than a mile – for two years.
I started elementary school in 1961, and graduated high school in 1973.
It’s hard to conceive of parents today allowing HS kids walk a mile all alone, much less grade schoolers!
For the first half of first grade, I lived down the street from my school and walked. We moved that spring, and my mother wanted me to go to the same school, so she put me on a city bus each day and the driver would tell me when we got there. The teacher would put me on in the afternoon to go home. The next year, we had moved again and I could walk the five or six blocks to school.
The suburb we moved to by 3rd grade had four elementary schools that fed the Jr./High school. Mine was four short blocks from my house. We always walked. One of the mothers would walk with the younger kids. I don’t remember ever being driven.
The Jr./High school was about a mile away and we walked there, too. Maybe some mothers had cars by then because I do remember being driven a few times when it snowed.
My first year at college, about five miles away, I rode my bike in fall and spring and got a ride with a friend that winter. I had to walk home one day when the bike had a flat. Only I had been visiting a friend on the other side of campus and that added an extra mile or so to the walk. That was a long afternoon.
