Fire Up Your Feet

Fire Up Your Feet is a Safe Routes to School program that emphasizes physical activity in and beyond school. In contrast to the other Safe Routes programs, this one is funding by the Kaiser Permanente Foundation rather than by state and federal transportation funds. The program encourages regular physical education, physical activity during recess, classroom physical activity or “brain breaks,” and throughout life outside of the school day. And it is for staff and student families as well as students.
We are in our second Fire Up Your Feet program for the 2014-2015 school year, working with Arden Middle School, Cameron Ranch Elementary, Cottage Elementary, Dyer-Kelly Elementary, and Howe Avenue Elementary. The majority of the activities will occur this coming spring, including participation in the Spring Challenge, Bike+Walk to School Day on Wednesday, May 6, and bicyclist and pedestrian education lessons. At Cameron Ranch we will be working in concert with the school’s Alliance for a Healthier Generation Healthy Schools program (more about that in a future post).
San Juan implemented a Fire Up Your Feet grant in the spring of 2014, working with Dyer-Kelly Elementary, Greer Elementary, Howe Avenue Elementary, Pasadena Avenue Elementary, and Whitney Avenue Elementary. A prominent part of the program was the provision of bicyclist and pedestrian education lessons at the five schools. We found that the spring challenge, in April, was hard to get off the ground because many lower income families to not have Internet access at home to enter their physical activity data. Though most have smart phones with access, the entry pages are not phone-friendly.