Gardiner Public School receives HDSB’s
inaugural Golden Shoe Award

Gardiner Public School has proven itself to be golden.

The school supported Clean Air Day last month and received the new Golden Shoe Award in the process, in supporting the Halton District School Board’s Active and Safe Routes to School program.

The clean air challenge was part of a Canada-wide Environment Week initiative, which encouraged schools to go green and use active, non-vehicular transportation to and from school. Clean Air Day’s goal was to help improve local air quality while simultaneously having a national affect as other communities participated in the event. 

Students from Kindergarten to Grade 8 were encouraged to walk or wheel to school (bike, skate, board or scooter) instead of arriving in their parent’s car. In addition, students who used active transportation were able to experience personal health benefits from the physical activity.

To make the event even more exciting, the inaugural Golden Shoe Award was unveiled and given to the school.

The award – clad in the golden colour to playfully mimic the quest for gold at the Olympics – is awarded to the classroom with the highest number of active transporters in a given week or day.

Classrooms vied for the award as teachers recorded how many of their students arrived by active transportation. In the end, the award went to Deirdre Lincoln’s Grade 6 class, which had 83 per cent of students arrive by foot or wheel. 

According to Kim Culhane, a Grade 4 teacher at Gardiner and the leader of the school’s Eco Club, “Clean Air Day was a great success. Many of the classes had more than 75 per cent of their students participate in helping out the environment.”

The school, which is looking forward to participating in Clean Air Day again next year, will continue to use the Golden Shoe Award to encourage students to regularly use active transportation to school.

To encourage more students to implement ‘green’ ways to arrive at school, the Halton District School Board has been supporting the Active and Safe Routes to School. It’s a provincial initiative that strives to create an environment conducive to, and supportive of, safe, walkable communities.

The idea is to get students walking, biking or roller blading to school rather than being driven to school. The benefits are many including exercising and limiting the amount of vehicle exhaust permeating the school property by reducing the number of vehicles idling on school grounds.

More than two-dozen Halton District School Board schools participate in the program as well as schools from the Halton Catholic District School Board.

There a number of initiatives within Active and Safe Routes to School including the Walking School Bus, in which parent volunteers walking a route, picking up children along the way and taking them to school; Walking Wednesdays, where one day a week is set aside as the day to walk to school; iWalk (International Walk to School Week and Day). This is an annual event held during the first week of October where schools and their surrounding community have the opportunity to learn about the many issues surrounding transporting children to and from school and to discuss alternatives; and Walk a Block, which involves setting up a drop-off zone for parents and school busses a block or more away from the school to encourage walking. This also helps to decrease traffic congestion at the school grounds.