Start a Walking School Bus at Your School with this Kit

The Walking School Bus is a walking service led by caregiver volunteers, where children are picked up at designated stops by the ‘school bus’ to join in on the walk to school. The Walking School Bus is a great option for families who want their child to walk but are not ready for them to walk to school on their own. Through this program, children gain additional daily physical activity and they learn valuable, lifelong skills around navigating traffic and roadways in their communities.

Between 2017-2019, Waterloo Region participated in a Walking School Bus project led by Canadian Cancer Society. Through this project we developed helpful tools and learned many best practices to make a Walking School Bus successful. We also learned that the heavy dependence on volunteers makes this intervention difficult (but not impossible!) to sustain. If your school community has a rich pool of volunteers, STSWR has the expertise to help you run your own Walking School Bus.

Our kit is in development, and we’ll work with you on the materials you need when you need them. Options include a training slide deck, route maps, traffic vests, whistles and lanyards, leader recruitment posters and postcards, “passenger” recruitment materials, boarding passes with lanyards.

For more information about the concept, visit https://walkingschoolbus.cancer.ca/.

If you’d like to talk about the supports we now have in place to help you develop a Walking School Bus, give us a call at 519-744-7575 x224.