Federal Law Now Says Kids Can Walk To School Alone (fastcoexist.com)

An anonymous reader writes: There's some good news for "free-range" parents and fans of children being allowed to walk places on their own. A recently approved federal education law will allow students to take alternative forms of transportation to and from school with parental permission. Fastcoexist reports: "Relax, parents. Now you can allow your kids to walk, ride a bike, or take a bus to school, without you or your children getting arrested. The recently-signed Every Student Succeeds Act contains a section (858) that protects the rights of kids to walk or go out alone. The act was sponsored by Utah senator Mike Lee, who is a supporter of the Free Range Kids movement, and provides some hope for parents who feel that their kids should be allowed some autonomy to get by own their own." One can only hope that children will be allowed to go to the park on their own soon as well.

Comments

This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Land of the free my ass. It's a nation of lunatics ruled by fear.

Re: This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[shabble]

No, if that were the case they would instead repeal the old law.

Which they're not doing. A recent case: http://www.freerangekids.com/m...

On Nov. 18, Maria Hasankolli of Wallingford, CT, came home in the early hours of the morning after visiting a relative at the hospital. She overslept while her 8-year-old stepson got himself ready for school — and missed his bus. The boy, Lucan, decided to walk to school on his own, two miles away, and was about halfway there when a business owner spotted him and called the cops. The cops drove Lucan to school, then went to his home, woke Hasankolli and clapped her into handcuffs.

She was driven to the police precinct, had her mug shot taken, and was given a $2500 bond. Her court date is this Wednesday. The charge?

Risk of injury to a minor.

Re:This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[shawn2772]

as a girl she really needs to walk with a buddy

Why?

Re:This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[hey!]

I think of this situation as being in part like the hygiene hypothesis for the rise in allergies: without the level of exposure to infectious microorganisms that would have been normal throughout most of human evolution, our immune systems go haywire. It is now so safe for children our normal protective instincts go haywire. Back when kids routinely worked in textile mills or as powder monkeys in mines nobody's eyebrows would have been raised by some kid walking a few miles to school. Now that kids are very safe indeed bad things that happen to them walking down a well-traveled street in broad daylight are a relatively greater fraction of the overall risk, even though that risk is very, very small.

Then there's the way that our information filters affect our perceptions of risk. Take school shootings; in the three years since Sandy Hook, 555 children 12 or under have been killed by firearms in the US; but as shocking as that is, you have to put it context; there are roughly 29 million children 14 and under in the US. In comparison about 2600 babies die each year from low birth weight; while in a global context the US infant mortality rate is relatively low, compared to similar wealthy countries it is shockingly high, which suggests that man of these deaths are preventable. Likewise the comparable number of children who die from influenza and pneumonia in that period isn't on the radar screen because it isn't news when a child dies from a commonplace but largely preventable infection. In 2014 there were 32,000 cases of whooping cough in the US leading to 20 deaths, and pertussis is an entirely eradicable disease.

Don't get me wrong; insofar as school shootings are preventable by practical steps we should take those steps; but we ought to prioritize causes of mortality and injury based on hard data, not our information filters.

Re:This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[DarkOx]

because society places a premium on girls. Boys and men are generally considered to be comparatively disposable. This has deep roots in survival instincts.

A tribe that suffers the loss of to many young women would be unable to propagate itself, efficiently. The harm from that could last generations. The loss of almost all the young males however could be more easily survived. Older males remain fertile longer than females, and one male can easily impregnate large numbers of women. Its pretty simple really.

Our instincts are what they are. We generally instinctively protect all of our children pretty enthusiastically. Giving into our more base desires to afford our female offspring a little extra safety is probably harmless. We have plenty of other instincts that don't fit the environment most of us live in to focus on fighting.

Re: This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[ShanghaiBill]

there's just the fact that OVERZEALOUS police are going: child alone = child in danger = get governement involved

The root problem is that crime rates have dramatically declined, yet we have more police than ever before. So we have too many cops with not enough "real" crime to deal with, so they just hassle people instead. People need to understand that more cops leads to more crime, not less, and stop voting for increases in policing, When you get a flyer in the mail saying a politician is endorsed by the police union, you should vote for the other guy.

Re: This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[blogagog]

"there's no old law that forbids it,"

That's the saddest part. There now has to be a law that 'allows' something.

Re:This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[AthanasiusKircher]

This part of the law is just designed to prevent isolated municipalities from nutty interpretations of existing law.

There have been a few recent examples of private citizens reporting unaccompanied children to the police.

I don't think you appreciate the scale of this problem. Yes, only "a few recent examples" probably reached the attention of the national media, but they are indicative of a much more widespread and more common problem. This site is obviously biased in one way, but it's dedicated to tracking stories like this. It's pretty common to see some rather outrageous intervention at least every couple weeks or so... somewhere in the U.S.

Generally, the kids are walking short distances (~1 mile).

Or an 11-year-old sitting alone in a car outside a store.

Or, ya know, an 11-year-old playing alone in his own yard unsupervised. Parents arrested on felony charges. Apparently your kid doesn't even need to be walking alone.

Once the police get involved, they often feel the need to charge someone, and generally find a way to fit "leaving your 8 year old child unattended for 20 minutes" into some form of neglect or endangerment. I'm not sure if any of these have resulted in actual conviction, but they have certainly resulted in handcuffings, arrests, and (perhaps most importantly) court fees.

This shows a gross misunderstanding of the worst issue for most parents. Yes, some parents end up held in jail for a day or something, and there are court fees.

But that's the relatively mild part and only the beginning of the nightmare that often follows. In many cases, Child Protective Services removes the kids from the parents, from anywhere to a few days to weeks to months in some cases. And even when parents fight to get their kids back, they are often subjected to various indignities -- mandatory parenting classes where they are taught how "not to neglect" their kids, periodic "check-ins" by CPS services at their homes, who have been known to find ridiculously minor "violations" or "concerns" (like a cluttered living room where kids have been playing -- too messy for CPS).

Poke around a bit and read the kinds of things that can happen. Also, keep in mind that hundreds of thousands of kids are removed by CPS to foster care in the U.S. every year, statistics compiled from CPS show that in somewhere around 1/3 of cases (about 100,000 kids), investigations eventually show that there was no credible threat at all to kids. That's not even covering cases where there was an "apparent" threat that was determined not to be significant enough to warrant removal -- these are thousands and thousands of cases where CPS takes kids and later says, "My bad. Turns out the removal wasn't really necessary." (Actually, of course, they never admit it that in those words. But they basically determine whatever evidence was used to justify removal was incomplete, a misunderstanding, or just a bogus report.)

And let's not even get into the stats on abuse and neglect in foster care, which tends to happen at higher rates than in homes with parents. So CPS is often removing kids from a safe house without investigating thoroughly and putting kids in places where they are more likely to be harmed. (Obviously, CPS also takes action in many, many cases every year where there IS serious abuse, and they should be commended for that -- but tell this to any parent whose child is taken away for no apparent reason.)

Perhaps this is getting a bit off-topic from TFA, but these are related issues. We have a culture that tends to assume any child alone (and by "child," states now often mean kids up to

Re:This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[AthanasiusKircher]

Statistically, children are far more likely to run into pedophiles in their family or in positions of authority than randomly on the street.

Indeed. Estimates vary, but most studies seem to put the number of stranger abductions as less than 5% of all child abductions. If you restrict it to "stereotypical stranger abduction scenarios" (child transported far away, detained overnight, and either held with intention to keep the child for a long time, ransomed, or killed), then you're talking about a tiny fraction of 1% of all abductions.

While we're invoking stats, it's also helpful to keep in mind that the VAST majority (~90%) of "missing children" are either "unintentionally" missing (miscommunicated plans, lost, whatever) or runaways. Of those who go missing, by far the most likely abduction scenario is a family member or close acquaintance. Even if children are abducted by a stranger, it's often close to home and they remain close to home, and often returned the same day. And though we mostly worry about young kids and pedophiles (i.e., those who prey on pre-pubescent kids), the vast majority of "child abductions" and sexual molestations, etc. are against (post-pubescent) teenagers.

In short, parents need to worry less about their little kid being abducted by a pedophile stranger and issuing an Amber Alert -- and they need to think more about their young teen being attacked by a coach or uncle or teacher or minister or close family friend.

Re: This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[bitingduck]

And in the United States in the early 1970s I did similar things. Crime was WAY worse then than now. But nobody thought anything of it.

We have become insane.

Yes. I walked to school with a couple other 6 year olds in 1st grade in the 70's. It's lightspeed peer to peer communication that's made us insane. Every bad thing that happens anywhere to anyone gets bumped up to national news so it seems like it's all in your backyard and around every corner.

Re:This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[edtice1559]

The funding that CPS gets is based on how many kids they put into foster care. Now I'm not saying that every CPS worker is thinking about that all of the time, but it has slowly affected the culture such that everybody has the reaction to put kids into foster care. Once a kid is in foster care, the standards are much lower. No kid would be removed from a foster family for any of these violations. The case worker would address it verbally and leave it out of the report and or decide that they've resolved it with the foster family and no further action is taken. If their funding were inversely proportional to how many kids ended up in foster families we'd see a much more sane approach. Only the most egregious cases should result in a removal of a kid from their home.

Re: This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[AthanasiusKircher]

This does not effect state or local law enforcement, unless you believe that kids walking to school are engaging in interstate commerce.

Well, given that "interstate commerce" has been extended to include growing food on your own property for the consumption of your family and your own animals, I think it's pretty easy for a kid walking to school to engage in it, assuming he eats a homegrown snack along the way.

I can just see it now: a kid stops and rests on a bench to eat a sandwich on the way home from school. Suddenly, the Feds screech up in black SUVs, a helicopter swoops in overheard. "Freeze! Put down the sandwich -- slowly! We have reason to believe that that sandwich contains a contraband tomato slice, grown on your property in violation of the Godawful Ugly Grocery Produce for All Americans Act of 2016. (Otherwise known as the GUGPAA! Act, which is the sound most Americans make when they spit out flavorless store-bought tomatoes.) We will have to confiscate the sandwich, fine you for violating the Act, and escort you to a holding facility until your parents can be re-educated into proper patriotic procedures, like buying your tomatoes at the supermarket!"

And heaven help the kid if he trades sandwiches with the Native American kid at school, since the Constitution explicitly allows not only regulation of interstate commerce, but also commerce "with the Indian tribes."

Re: This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[Ol Olsoc]

And in the United States in the early 1970s I did similar things. Crime was WAY worse then than now. But nobody thought anything of it. We have become insane.

And how!

Safety culture meets helicopter parents meets attachment parenting meets irrational fear equals this batshit insanity.

And the concept of no child unsupervised needs to die. These people are damaging their children with well meaning but irrational hovering, over supervision, and the fear that the second they aren't watching the child, Jerry Sandusky will show up.

Law and Order : Special Victims Unit is a fictional Television show, not a documentary, folks!

Even back in the 90's, when this helicoptering crap was getting started, my son and his friends played street hockey, in the streets!

Let's wait a minute for all the people to revive from their faint....

Okay, everyone back? If anyone needs a Xanax take a couple. We discretely kept an eye on them, but let them alone. Squabbles? Check. Silliness? Check. Learning how to get along with others to resolve issues? Check. Learning that there were some statements that were not to be ignored? (CAR!) Check.

What was impressive to watch was how kids figured all this stuff out. Nothing turned into "Lord of the Flies". These children were leaning valuable social skills, getting exercise, and having fun.

The reason this part of the law was enabled is because safety culture has entered the stage of failing. Protecting children by taking away normal loving parents is not protecting them, its doing grave damage to them in the name safety.

Because we now have to protect ourselves from safety culture.

Re: This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[jedidiah]

Yup. This is the same kind of insane hysterical liberal that mistakes a jack on the hood of a jeep for an "assault rifle" and threatens to call the police. It's the same sort of punitive, vindictive use of 911, the police, or child protective services.

These people love to brag about how they will call CPS over someone in a store scolding an unruly child.

Take SWATing and add some sanctimonious political posturing.

Re: This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[AthanasiusKircher]

The boy, Lucan, decided to walk to school on his own, two miles away, and was about halfway there when a business owner spotted him and called the cops.

This is something often not pointed out -- yes, police sometimes choose to intervene in such cases on their own. But very frequently they only take these actions because some neighborhood busybody calls the cops -- who then feel they need to take action.

I remember reading about this story back when it happened, and the business owner may have had a legitimate concern about how busy the streets were on the kid's route.

But the important thing is to compare the reaction to that situation a few decades ago. Fifty years ago if a local business owner noticed something like that, he'd go out and ask the kid where he was going. And then he'd offer to call the parent if he thought it was dangerous. And if the parent didn't answer, he might call the local policeman and ask if they could drive the kid, who would just do so without making a big deal. Or the business owner might even offer to close up his shop for five minutes and drive the kid the rest of the way to school himself.

These days if a business owner did the latter, the kid would likely start screaming "pedophile! offered me a ride in his car!" and the business owner would have ended up in jail along with the mom. Heck, somebody else might even think it suspicious if he went outside to ask the kid whether the kid was all right -- "unknown man approaching a child," some other passersby might think... and then THEY would call the cops on the man.

So, he did the only thing an adult male can do in the U.S. when he sees an unaccompanied child and is concerned -- he called the police without even approaching the kid and asking the kid about the situation. Instead of a reasonable community reaction to help a kid get to school, hysteria causes everyone to act in unreasonable ways.

Re:This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[sociocapitalist]

because society places a premium on girls. Boys and men are generally considered to be comparatively disposable. This has deep roots in survival instincts.

A tribe that suffers the loss of to many young women would be unable to propagate itself, efficiently. The harm from that could last generations. The loss of almost all the young males however could be more easily survived. Older males remain fertile longer than females, and one male can easily impregnate large numbers of women. Its pretty simple really.

Our instincts are what they are. We generally instinctively protect all of our children pretty enthusiastically. Giving into our more base desires to afford our female offspring a little extra safety is probably harmless. We have plenty of other instincts that don't fit the environment most of us live in to focus on fighting.

Depends on which society you're talking about. There is a severe dearth of girl babies in both China and India, relative to the population. My no doubt imperfect understanding is that in China this is largely because of the old one child law where boys would be earners and so were more desirable than girl babies, and in India where Hindu requires a boy for the death rites of the parents in addition to the boys being earners.
http://www.scientificamerican....
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...

Re: This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[Ol Olsoc]

there's just the fact that OVERZEALOUS police are going: child alone = child in danger = get governement involved

The root problem is that crime rates have dramatically declined, yet we have more police than ever before. So we have too many cops with not enough "real" crime to deal with, so they just hassle people instead.

I can't argue your premise, but a lot of these cases are because some alarmed person who probably watched too many episodes of Law and Order - Special Victims Unit has called 911 because there is an unattended child out in dangerville.

Just last year, we had an Amber alert about a boy in our neighborhood. School left out, he was a walker, Television, radio, police out, our cell phones, everyone in a panic.

five minutes later it was a Emily Latella "never mind". The child was talking with a friend, they were walking slowly, and took a couple minutes longer to get home.

Two months ago in the village where I grew up, there was another police activation. Some older gentleman had just picked up his first smartphone and asked some 10 year old girls a question about how to operate it. He was detained and then released because he was just some old dude who was trying to figure out how his phone worked.

Until we get a hold on safety culture, any male who has any interaction with children he doesn't know is an idiot. That old dude was from a different time, and must realize that in safety culture America, he is a pre-pedophile. He fit the profile, White - upper middle aged, and male, so that means he is one. And it's funny in a terribly unfunny way. Abused children are often distrusting of others, fearful and nervous. They've had some bad things happen to them.

So in making certain they don't get abused, we're making them distrusting of others, fearful and nervous. We have become the abusers of children. We are doing bad things to them in the name of protecting them.

Re:This was _outlawed_ in the USA?

[LaurenCates]

Disclaimer: I am a woman who grew up in the ghetto.

Catcalling may be distasteful, but it isn't threatening in and of itself.

If you catcall me and you stay put when I walk away, it isn't a threat.

If you catcall me and follow me in your truck for a couple blocks, I'm bound to duck into a store or veer towards somewhere I know where people are at. And I don't normally walk alone at night where there aren't people.

If your wife feels like a steak "lying" in front of hyenas, perhaps she needs to adjust her perspective to determine whether or not she's going to be attacked. I sincerely hope she hasn't, and you haven't indicated that she has been.

But let's not go overboard. If a bunch of men are hooting at you but aren't doing anything to directly endanger your safety, get a grip. If you think being "ogled" is a problem, never leave the house, so such a "threat" never befalls you.

The nanny state is ridiculous

[AaronW]

When I was in kindergarten I walked to school every day, it was only around 3 blocks away. Going to the park alone was also normal. The sad thing is that it is a lot safer today than it was back then. I consider myself quite liberal, but I detest the whole nanny state. I've also read numerous articles about parents who are arrested for leaving young children in the car, in the shade with the windows open while running into the grocery store.

Hell, reading this article reminded me about how my mother would go into a local supermarket to do some quick shopping while I watched my younger sister in the car. Today my mother would have been arrested.

As a kid I ran around all over the place without my parents hovering over me every second. I got out and got exercise and explored, something many parents won't allow today. That was before the days of the Internet or before cell phones or bike helmets. The only difference I would have with my own kids is to make them wear a bicycle helmet when riding (due to experience with how it saved the life of a relative several times) and possibly a cell phone.

Kids need to be kids and also to learn responsibility, not be coddled like crazy.

In Switzerland, they pretty much have to, by law

[ControlFreal]

In Switzerland (at least in my home Canton of Zurich), the children's way to school ("Schulweg") is pretty much sacred: Walking to school alone teaches the children to deal with the world around them, and it builds confidence. During the first year of Kindergarten you can bring them, but then they go alone.

When children live too far away from school, there is a bus service, but they make a point of letting the children off the bus some 1000ft from school, so that they still have their "Schulweg."

Obligatory "when I was a kid" post.

[gfxguy]

I walked to elementary school every day until we moved farther away, at which point I alternatively either road my bike or took the bus (and occasionally walked anyway). That continued through middle and high school, and that was up in NY.

Now it's 40 years or so later, I live in GA, and my kids are not allowed to ride their bikes to school. Walkers at my daughter's middle school require permits that they have to pay a fee for.

It's ridiculous.

At the same time, for whatever reason, walking to Elementary school was just fine, and walking to the high school is fine... so it's obviously up to individual school. If you're planning on having kids, and can't afford private schools, do yourself a favor and DO NOT move to GA.

Re:Purpose of the law...

[Trepidity]

This law is a carve-out from previous laws that specify what you can not do. There's a very general law prohibiting parents from endangering their children. This one amends that law to clarify that letting your child walk to work doesn't constitute endangering children.

Unconstitutional

[markdavis]

Please show me where in the Constitution the federal government is given the power to address such things such as education or children walking to school. I seem to remember that if it isn't listed there, those powers ARE RESERVED BY THE STATES.

Re:Unconstitutional

[Insightfill]

Please show me where in the Constitution the federal government is given the power to address such things such as education or children walking to school. I seem to remember that if it isn't listed there, those powers ARE RESERVED BY THE STATES.

A closer reading of the Act (see pages 857-858) says that the parents can't be held criminally or civilly liable if they let their kids - with permission - get to school in an "age appropriate manner." It also says that the Act itself doesn't supersede any local laws.

So: if a state or locality has decided or later decides to specifically make a law specifically against "unattended kids going to school," that law would take precedence over this act. "States rights" are still in effect here.