School communities are full of voices that are important in our conversations about safe streets, including parents, teachers, administrators, school board staff and trustees, and most crucially the students themselves. Despite young people’s enthusiasm for cycling, school communities are generally not engaged in public discussion about new or potential cycling infrastructure projects.
To bridge this gap, the Families and Educators for Safe Cycling project piloted different approaches and strategies for engaging school communities with cycling infrastructure projects in Toronto, over two years (2018-2019). The team produced a fabulous guide providing a step-by-step model of how to engage schools in cycling infrastructure projects.
The guide also includes unique and useful Complete Street resources and lesson plans for elementary and secondary school teachers. Appendix A of the guide provides lesson plans for a one-class and five-class Complete Streets Design Project and Appendix B provides worksheets for executing the Complete Street Design Project. The Complete Streets Design Project was adapted with permission from materials by Maximum City.
The project was led by CultureLink Settlement and Community Services, in partnership with Cycle Toronto and the Toronto Cycling Think and Do Tank. TCAT provided editorial support on the final report.