to you all of that would be of interest. you can see the specific what we received to date in part two of the call. supervisor kim: that would be great to get a sense of what is coming in and what folks are prioritizing about the city. i am glad there were a lot of projects submitted for pedestrian safety. i know that is only 25% of the fund. i think that is the way it was brought to the voters. >> correct. supervisor kim: thank you. supervisor avalos: ok, thank you. can we move this item forward, colleagues, without objection? that, we shall do. next item. >> item 10, update on the san francisco safe routes to school education and outreach program. this is an information item. >> hi. good morning again.

principal transportation planner with the authority. i will give a brief introduction, and then we will have the program manager for the school coalition at from the department of public health and a brief presentation to the looks like we do not have the powerpoint, and i apologize for that. it is on a flash a dry, so we will get that loaded up wall i am speaking. ok, so, in july of 2010, the authority board prep $500,000 in original safe process school funds. and the education and outreach program. those funds provided funding for the coalition to do education and outreach for 15 elementary schools throughout san francisco. we have a map that identifies those schools. anna will go through the specific programs. the funding for the past school year, 2011-2012, and the next school year, 2012-2013. the presentation goes after the

first year, lessons learned and what of bids are happening for next year's program. it is also timely because the region mtc has developed another regional program. $20 million throughout the region. san francisco receives a $1.4 million. we will be doing a call for projects for those funds probably in the winter of 2013. we need our project list to mtc by june of 2013. in the next presentation, we will talk about the one bay area funds but we have a set-aside for the school funds. the way we are currently thinking about it is that the one bay area funds will be for infrastructure projects, whereas this will be for a continuation and enhancement of this safe  to school education fund and outreach. >> good morning, commissioners.

anna with the san francisco safe routes to school program. i am going to give you a brief overview of the program. we have been operating for about three years. the goal of the program is to increase safe and active walking and biking to and from school. we are mainly working in elementary schools right now. we are the lead agency, and we work with a multidisciplinary team, including the school district, obviously. city agencies such as the police department, mta, department of environment, and we also have a couple nonprofit partners. and the presidio y. we are in 15 elementary schools, one in each district. the only district we do not have a school in his district two. there are only two public schools in the district and i applied. we are going to make a special

outreach this fall to that district. supervisor kim: i am not sure you take into account the new redistricting lines in this map. >> we applied leg two years ago, so it was sherman and spring valley that were the only two. so we can look at that. supervisor kim: because district 6 will not have any either. marshall is no longer in district 9. >> thank you for telling me that. supervisor kim: we will still have public schools but not on this map. >> thank you. supervisor kim: let me clarify that. we will still have public schools in district 6, but not one in the project. >> i am a heavy supporter of marshall elementary. they should absolutely get this program. >> it to back up, the program is based on international model of the five e's.

education, encouragement, enforcement, engineering, and evaluation. due to the funding source, the enforcement and engineering parts were not fund the bulk. so we're only going to be talking about three out of the five e's in this presentation. these are the program schools with the old district lines, and we're going to be looking at -- actually, we have work to do. we will have to look at the district map and look at the overlay and see which school districts we will need to do special outreach to. supervisor avalos: i am happy to see two district's 11 schools there. >> and we would love to have way more than just 15. supervisor avalos: of course. actually, it has been a great program for my district, especially longfellow -- longfellow which is on the t we have had leadership from the parents, students, -- students, and teachers. >> it has become part of the

culture at longfellow. back to the -- just a quick overview of our program deliverables. we have the education portion, a kindergarten classroomñc%+÷ lesn where we talk about the various ways of getting to and from school with the benefits of walking and biking. one of our partners goes in and as a classroom lesson in the second grade were they actually take a small field trip around the school, and the practice crossing the street, talking about different ways of walking around safely in the city. the fourth grade lesson, two lessons for the come in and practice putting on a helmet properly, and then they actually do a bike rodeo in the schoolyard. you can see for each of those lessons, they reach 40 to 50 classrooms and approximately 1000 students in each of the grades in the 15 schools. the encouragement part is a fun, easy way of getting safe routes

to school started in a community. we have walked to school day. i will be a little busy, but i would like to invite you to come and enjoy it on october 3 of this year. it is always the first wednesday in october. last year, we had over 7000 participants. we have bike to school day. we host that at the end of the school year, somewhere in the late spring. we had close to 2000. we thought we would have more, but there was a pouring rain storm a half-hour before the event. we are considering moving it to may because of the weather considerations the past couple of years. we focus on trying to establish walking school buses and bike chains. this has been identified as a best practice for safe routes to schools nationwide, from the national center. this is basically a group of students better chaperoned by adults that are either walking or biking together. we have regular even said george

washington carver, buena vista, and other schools. we will like to establish these as regular events at each one of the schools we're working in. most importantly, parent- caregiver outreach, because we want to create that culture. that exists at longfellow and all of our schools, about walking andhmtpú biking to scho. then we evaluate everything we do. so we have student travel tallies. we go into the classrooms and ask the kids of the dow to and from school. then we have parent service that would apparent attitude towards walking and biking to school. not surprisingly, distance the child lives from school is strongly associated with how they get to and from school. the general rule of thumb is a half mile is the general buffer of how far a gigawatt to and from school. a mile is how far a kid can bike to and from school. if you live beyond that, it is hard for a child and their family to get to school. three of the top five concerns

from parents were traffic- related. you can see here. safety at intersections and crossings. the amount in speed of traffic. the other two were distance and also violence and crimes. just looking in our past three years on performance measures, we looked at if we established any mode shift with children getting to and from school. overall, we did see a 3% decrease in walking, but we actually feel like that factor is beyond our control. there were a number of schools that we were working in that were neighborhood schools that wind city-wide immersion, -- actually, marshall had an 8% drop. they went from neighborhood to city-wide spanish immersion, and we feel like a lot more families are probably coming from outside of that one-mile buffer that we cannot really have much control over the conversion, the assignment process. but we did see a 1% increase in

biking. we saw zero changes in single- family vehicle driving, which is quite interesting considering that the yellow school buses either being rerouted or eliminated slowly in the school district. we look at individual schools. out of our 15, 11 did see increased rates of walking and biking. six schools of decreased rates of single-family vehicle driving. this is significant for us. this is the first year we have seen any no shift, even though it is modest. it is because this year, we focused hard in parent-caregiver outreach. the first two years we did a lot of student lessons, but they are not the ones making the decisions on how to get to school. supervisor olague: this question was sort of answer but not really. it has to do with the lottery system for some of these city- wide schools. how do take the conversation beyond where it is currently? it is not like we're living in

mayberry and people walk to the neighborhood school. it may not exist. many are having to rely on muni, so i think that at some point there should be a conversation with parents, care givers, and students and whatever about how we ensure that students get to school on time and safely. because it there are a lot of households were there are two parents working. there are a lot of challenges in getting children to school safely on munies is the yellow buses are basically being eliminated. >> right, and that is especially true for the middle and high school let it -- levels. right now, we're working with elementary, but we want to expand. when we looked at these was elected, one of our criteria is that we had a majority of children living within a mile. so that as guinta walker bike to school is actually realistic. -- so asking to walk or bike to school is realistic. there are a certain percentage

that live nearby. it usually tends to be somewhere around 30% to 40%. so even though we do have a city-wide application process, we do feel like in each school, there is a population that we can reach that is realistic. and it is interesting to see with the new assignment process -- this is the first year to see what happens to those in coming grades and how the student population may or may not change the over six to seven years as that rolls through each grade. supervisor olague: where are you in the conversation with getting to muni safely? >> we actually have not done that, but we will give you some ideas to do that. supervisor olague: ok, thank you. >> some accomplishments we have had outside of the program partnered with ucsf pediatrics.

we conducted a districtwide study. this is the first time -- the school district and not have school commuted data. this is the first time. if it includes middle and high. we have done this twice so far. we plan to do it again in the fall. 24% were walking or biking in 2010. it is gone up a couple of percentage points which is actually pretty significant for the entire school district. 24% lived within, lc the half m, and another 18% within a mile. so we feel like there is a significant proportion of children and families that we can reach to ask them to consider walking and biking. we also partnered with mta, taking this data we did with ucsf, to establish a prioritization system looking at mainly the 73 elementary schools. and those that had really high rates of walking, we combined that with injury data.

those that had high rates of walking and, unfortunately, high numbers of pedestrian crashes, those are now at the top as the schools will be the top candidates for a capital grant to approve the bill to infrastructure and the environment around the school. f list is jean parker, which sits at the broadway tunnel in chinatown, and was just awarded a grant from caltrans. we found out a couple weeks ago that we were successful in getting a grant to improve the environment around at school. supervisor olague: great, congratulations. >> thank you. i have to give credit to mta for that one. the lessons learned to approve the program in the near future, we obviously need to do much more apparent-caregiver outreach. they're the ones deciding other children get to and from school. we want to actively recruit these parents and caregivers to participate in the program at the school, and then we're going

to start doing more significant outreach at night and weei]ç at festivals, at school councils to try to bring the programs to those working families that we cannot reach by going into the classroom and talking to the students. we also want to establish regular walking walk-and-roll events. our most successful story is george washington carver. áúqrñthey established daily walg school buses, morning and noon. this spring, would like to see that every school we're working in. we need to recruit the parent ['s staff cannot leave it these because of liability concerns to go beyond the school fence. it is up to the parents and caregivers to start leading these on the school property. supervisor avalos: where do you find the best bang for your buck in terms of outreach?

>> kindergarten orientation. because they are paying the most attention. they are brand new to the school. they want to know everything they can no to help their kindergartner. we can start the behavior and start trying to change it later. next month, we're going to be school night and kindergarten orientation. supervisor avalos: that sounds great. my office has done a lot of outreach to the schools, and we would be very happy to help in those efforts as well if there are letters we can write to schools. we visit the schools fairly frequently. we can be part of the messenger. >> that would be fantastic. any avenue available to us, we would be very happy to take. we would like to, again, recruit these parents-caregivers to lead the walking school buses and these a bike trains and provide a lot of support to them so that they are the ones championing

it in their schools. with additional funding, as has been mentioned, we do have some possible long-term changes we would like to make to the program. most importantly, we want to expand beyond just 15 schools. we want to reach out to the middle and high school levels. that is when we will start talking about transit. over half of the children in middle and high starting to take muni on their own, and start to incorporate how walking, biking, a transit, and carpooling fit within those school strata. it is not a secret, as you know, the school climate is under a lot of stress because of budget deficits and all the demands. we would like to streamline our education portion. instead of taking precious, on the in-class lesson time, we would like to move toward an assembly model and do more after-school so that we can

alleviate the burden on the and we would like to hire dedicated staff with the site coordinators for the program that are native in different languages to serve the diverse bodies that the school district serves, that they will conduct intensive outreach. they basically adopt a school or a co-worker of schools. do the outreach, recruit the parent, provide materials and collateral, and do that face-to- face at the kindergarten orientations, at pta, at festivals. create monthly task forces for these to interact with each other and create a lot of energy school environment. lastly, would like to develop taylor transportation demand management tool kits for each school. looking at one school in developing a package and saying, here is all you're walking a school bus routes. here are your bike lanes, bus stops, and here is how to sign

up for school pool. a have the staff of site coordinators take that and market it into the school community and try to market qóñother modes of transportation other than single family vehicle driving as in the fall. that brings me to the end. i forgot to put the website on here. www.saferoutes.org. i am happy to answer questions. supervisor kim: thank you. thank you so much for this presentation. it is very interesting. even though i was on the school board, it is great to see some of the data on how families get to schools. it is interesting to see that almost 50% of our families live within a mile of the public school they attend. countering the narratives around how people go to school. but i know we have certain

schools that are very much neighborhood schools where you can see the proportions, particularly the southeast. in 10 and 11, those tend to be neighborhood schools but they rarely get students commuting from other parts of the city. they tend to prioritize. >> also district 9. supervisor kim: yes. i was happy to hear about jean partner. that is a crazy intersection for a very small kids to be walking. i would say that's bessie is the other school that is really close. >> that is number 9. but a number have already gone grants, so it will bump up. supervisor kim: bessie is right off a freeway entrance. they do have an alleyway that we have encouraged parents to use. but i know those intersections can be very hairy. the last point is on supervisor olague's xq

many of our kids depend on the muni system to get back and forth from school. particularly in the afternoon, we have seen the data that there are larger public safety issues, and of course, bullying that happens on it muni. it has been an issue i have thought a long time about, but i think we need to work with mta and prioritize that as an issue. i think the highest number of kind of the electronic gadget thaefts happen between 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. certain bus lines are worse than others. i think the 22, i have heard, it used to be the 15th, and also the one that goes -- there are a couple targeted bus lines. there used to be a program where adults would rise to some of these bus lines -- would rise to some of these bus lines to monitor and mentor on the buses. on some of the bus lines with highs levels of incidents.

it is really between 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m., and i hear that fridays are the worst days. but if we kind of know the data already, i would love to be a part of a conversation, and i am sure some of my colleagues here would love to become a part of the conversation on how to make muni safer for kids as well. >> at the elementary school level, it is the only 10% of the families taking it. supervisor kim: i am really talking about middle school. >> exactly, with a middle school and high, we have to take that into a serious consideration. supervisor kim: thank you. supervisor olague: and that was the point from my earlier comments. i am concerned that the percentage of students who are basically forced to take the muni to the other thing is i think there needs to be better coordination, because the bus routes are extremely crowded. i am wondering where you are --

maybe this is not a question that should be directed to you all, but where are we in the conversation about which a bus lines are used more frequently to transport students to public- school cent? what times are those buses in use? >> right, i do not have that information, but i am sure the transcript -- transportation effectiveness project or something similar at the mta does have that information and we can get that to you. supervisor olague: i guess the move would be 100% reliant on muni for transportation to public schools. what is the percentage of yellow buses that will remain in use? >> it will be significantly reduced. they are about to start your two of the three-year plan. my understanding, it is not going to be completely eliminated.

some lines will stay. they will be rerouted. but i am not sure -- i do not know the percentage of production. i can also get thatl and get back to you. supervisor olague: that would be good. i like to know which schools will be affected, which students will be affected the most. is there any correlation between truancy and absences and reliance on public transportation? i guess that is one that would have to be coordinated with the school districts. >> yes. supervisor olague: but that is thewñ-w question i definitely he to see the impacts. when the yellow buses were in place, there was probably a set time. this kind of gets the trust that the passage would be safer, although i am sure there was a bullying and these other things, in direct. and now, i think it raises a lot of issues that, you know, yellow

buses and walking and biking do not raise. >> i will talk to my partners at the school district and try to get that information as soon as possible. most of them are on summer break right now. supervisor olague: like supervisor kim, i would like to be part of that conversation, getting ahead of the issue. we can make safe assumptions. as supervisor kim mention, i have heard about the increase in thefts and that sort of thing. i do not know. >> ok, great. supervisor avalos: raykovitz thank you. thank you for your presentation. really great thoughts. -- great, thank you. we can open this item up for public comment. please come forward. >> hello. i am elizabeth with walk san francisco.

walk san francisco as a partisan in the safe route to school program. to reiterate what supervisor kim said, we're in an interesting position in san francisco in having almost half of our kids at the elementary school level able to walk or bike, and about half of that so we have a lot of room for improvement. i'd think san francisco -- i mean, if we cannot do this here, where can we doñ>gçç this? the distances are short. z29[laughs] well, it is not 103 today. i wanted to invite you all to support -- to participate in walk to school day on october 3, the first wednesday in october. i know a bunch of you have done that already, some of yet more than one school. last year, we had over 7000 kids participating. 44 schools.

so this year we can do even better. i am excited to work with you all to)jptñ be out there on octr 3. thank you. supervisor avalos: thank you very much. is there any other member of the public who would like to comment? >> sorry, i meant to mention one thing. 53;(áu(s&y, this fall will be or first walk to school day when we had 15 mile an hour school zones around 181 schools city- wide. so that is doing a lot to improve walking and biking conditions around schools. although, of course, as we have heard, there are still schools with pretty big, scary intersections and streets nearby. i think that is the next priority, to fix those. but that is something that is very important to let folks know about. it has been a very big walk sf campaign. and if people cannot know the speed limit is 15 miles per hour, they will not obey it. so we need to help get the word

out about that. thank you. supervisor avalos: great, thank you. >> just a very quick comment. i think this is a fascinating conversation. h(ái kim and olague said, in particular to point out that because of the density and because of the small surface area of the city, we do have the luxury of looking at this as something that is totally doable. i think it is really fundamental that we regard the task of transporting these kids, not just as a matter of providing service but as a matter of raising the standard so that everybodyh7'íi that getn the muni bus or on a public transportation vehicle feels safe so that transportation is not what it has become in other american cities. as one famous writer says, the

siberia of transportation. i want to remind you all -- i do not have the statistics at my fingertips, but we are in a situation where in every american city, practically 90% of people living in it are third-generation a suburban raised. so getting in the car is the first instinct. whether it is to take the kids to school are anything else. so keeping public transportation at a high standard, not just being on time but making sure nobody feels like they are in an unsafe situation in a bus, starting with the kids. it is an incredibly important goal. because it keeps the middle class on the bus. then it truly is a safe place to be. the nobody has a bias against taking the bus or against funding the bus. that is ultimately were the but stops. supervisor avalos: we can add to