Last week, I had the opportunity to join three dozen first graders on their second “transit oriented field trip” of the year. From a Westside public school down the trip went to the California Science Center in Exposition Park. The kids walked just over a mile to a Metro Expo Line station before riding the line east to the Exposition Park/USC stop. Later in the day, we repeated the trip in reverse.
“We decided at the start of the year that we were going to use transit for our field trips,” explains one first grade teacher. “It’s important.”
True, for many students in Los Angeles and throughout the world, riding a train, bus or both is just a part of the daily commute. But, for some of the kids on this trip, it was their first time on the Expo Line. For others, it was their first on any sort of train. Thanks to an earlier field trip that relied on the Santa Monica Big Blue Bus, it was not the first transit trip for any of the students.
Continue reading “#StreetsR4Families: A Transit Oriented Field Trip”