Green Bay students get a free ride | Our View

Green Bay Press-Gazette Editorial Board

Jackson Elementary School students on Tuesday went on a field trip to the Neville Public Museum in downtown Green Bay.

To get there, they didn’t board the typical yellow school bus.

Instead, they rode on a Green Bay Metro bus.

The distinction is noteworthy as it’s part of a program between the Green Bay Area Public Schools and the city of Green Bay.

As of July 1, all Green Bay School District students will be able to ride Metro buses for free year-round.

The city, Green Bay schools and Green Bay Metro Transit are to be commended for finding a workable solution that will be able to get students to school activities. Or to work. Or just across town to a friend’s house. Live54218 helped bring the sides to the table and facilitated the discussion.

The school district will pay $180,000 a year — a rate that was negotiated to take into account the bus passes the district used to purchase.

The agreement makes sense for a couple of reasons:

» It helps students get to and from school, and to and from activities, school or otherwise. It enables them to get to work, attend summer school, get home after practice. This ability to be independent enough to get to these destinations without having to rely on parents lessens a burden for everyone.

» It introduces some students to mass transit, making riding a bus a normal activity. It doesn’t have to be scary or intimidating in the way that the unknown can be.

» It lessens congestion on city streets. OK, it won’t empty the streets of traffic. But if those Jackson Elementary students had used a school bus, they would have added one more vehicle on a street where Green Bay Metro was already providing the same service, in the same type of vehicle. It also saves the district having to spend money on a bus drive and fuel to transport students on field trips.

» It’s educational. That might not be the overriding goal of the program, but it’s a nice side effect. Students who ride the bus need to check bus routes and make a plan on how to get to their destination. It requires more work than plugging an address into an iPhone and driving there.

» It can lead to healthier communities. A University of Illinois study showed that “investing in convenient and affordable public transit systems may improve public health by reducing obesity, thereby providing more value than had been previously thought,” according to Sheldon H. Jacobson, a professor of computer science at Illinois.

The theory is that you’ll do more walking. There’s not always a bus stop outside your destination. So you’ll have to walk from your home to the bus stop and from the bus stop closest to your destination.

» It removes financial barriers to getting around in a city as big as Green Bay where walking isn’t always an option.

As Green Bay Schools Associate Superintendent Kim Pahlow said, the program “provides equity and access for our students to a variety of opportunities across the city and throughout the district.”

Those are two goals worth pursuing.