New Haven Independent

Usually Kayle’s uncle drives her to school. She falls asleep in the back.

Friday she joined 600 students, parents, and community members on an organized parade.

“But when I walked, like I did today, I feel, you know, full of exercise, and I’m waked up.”

She could very well be the poster child of Fair Haven’s festive “Walk to School Parade,” which assembled the school’s 600 kids, from tiny-stepping kindergartners to long striding 8th graders, in a spirited parade from Quinnipiac River Park to the school near Ferry Street on Friday morning.

The distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile, wasn’t long, but the goal is great, according to bicycling Erin Sturgis-Pascale, shown below with fellow alder Joey Rodriguez and Fair Haven School’s impressive turn-around principal Kim Johnsky on a beautiful morning, as the kids formed up.

“The idea is to promote a healthy walkable community,” said Sturgis-Pascale, “and this is a baby step, although an important one.

The longer strides she and Rodriguez have in mind include applying for some of $16 million in federal Safe Routes to School dollars. What that program will do, she added, is, “if we can secure the money, we can help rebuild sidewalks along Grand Avenue, for example, promote traffic calming measures, organize parents into ‘walking buses’”.

These are groups of parents who live in proximity to walk, who form up, one in front, one in back, with a group of kids safely in between from home to school.

They described Grand Avenue, with its school, food stores, library, banks, and other amenities all within a half mile of each other, as the perfect setting for a walking community. And, they suggested, that a community that walks together, talks together as well. That is, solves its problems through community engagement.

Rodriguez and Sturgis-Pascale said they hoped to apply next year, along with two schools and other institutions in the area. Those schools would be Johnsky’s Fair Haven and the Clinton Avenue School where the first successful walking parade was held some six months ago. Click here for that story.

“Up next,” said Rodriguez, “is John Martinez,” and then to cover the other schools in the Fair Haven neighborhood, the suggestion was even made that the new Columbus Family Academy, to open in the fall on Grand at Blatchley, might take its first step, literally, having the kids all walk, not be transported in on the first day.

Teddi Barra (pictured on the far right), the director of transportation for the Board of Ed, said, with happy irony, that if all this was successful, she might lose her job. In further irony, she told a reporter that she grew up in the “projects” at the end of Front Street, which have now become Q-Terrace. “I walked to both these schools every day.”

And how did kids other than Kayle Yanza feel about the experiment in walking? Frankly, there were some skeptics among the seventh graders helping gym teacher Travis Gale hold up the sign with the Fair Haven School’s mascot, the eagle.

Luis Rivera, who walks seven blocks to school (according to Gale perhaps 150 kids out of the schools 600 walk, although hundreds more are in walking distance), said that walking was not fun. It was not full of exploration and bird watching and talking to neighbors and so forth, as the Sturgis-Pascale paradigm hopes for. At least not yet. In fact, said young Rivera, “I’d like to ride the bus like most of the kids.”

“Right,” replied Sturgis-Pascale, “the idea is to change the culture of the neighborhood to make walking cool.”

And that means working as much with the parents as the kids.

To do that, the grant money is important, for example, for those new sidewalks, and for safer traffic. “Would you send your kid to cross Grand Avenue as is? I wouldn’t,” she said.

She and Rodriguez and the two local schools plan to apply for the $16 million for next year. Rodriguez said that given the cutting going on in the current municipal budget, there might not be a lot of money available for sidewalk repair, and this federal Safe Routes to School pot an excellent alternative source for dollars.

Between now and then, these important “baby steps,” as Alderwoman Sturgis-Pascale described them, are already producing positive eye-opening experiences and positive civic engagements … with, for example, the local fish.

For just as the group was about to move out on parade, Gary Uhlen, a local fisherman from Atwater Street, who comes out at least twice a week to try his luck, reeled in a 32 inch blue fish from the roiling waters of the Quinnipiac River.

He was happy to show his natural history specimen to the kids, but as the blue fish had very sharp teeth and a still quivering mouth, he wanted to keep a certain distance.

Yesenina Perez’s bright second graders Carlos Cruz (on the left) and Camillo Guapo, had just been studying the life cycle of animals.

Here, a few feet away from them, they got to see one blue fish’s life cycle come to an end. It’s hard to imagine having that kind of experience from a school bus window.

Incidentally, Perez’s students - many of whom began school speaking no English at all — along with the entire second grade, said Johnsky proudly, scored 94 percent on goal in language arts in a recent internal assessment.

That was highest in the district. And these kids have two days of gym plus three days with recess (on non-gym days) as well. Is there a connection between exercise and academic achievement? Yes, according to the teachers interviewed. If all the kids begin to walk to school, who knows what heights the kids will rise to in school, and how many blue fish they will see along the way?