HLTH 5493 Module 2 Evidence-Based Program Selection Example

Choosing the Walking School Bus: Comparing Four Active Travel Options and Adapting One for Linden Park Elementary Without Losing What Made It Work

Student Name

American College of Education

HLTH5493: Health and Wellness Program Design and Implementation

Module 2 Assignment

Instructor Name

August 10, 2026

Introduction

The Module 1 assessment at Linden Park, the composite Title I elementary school described there, found that 64% of students live within a mile of school but only 11% walk. The causes lay mainly with parents: fear of traffic and strangers, early work shifts and the absence of any adult to walk with children. This paper moves from those causes to a program. It sets out four options that address school travel, compares them on explicit criteria, selects one and then adapts it to Linden Park while protecting the components that made it effective in the studies behind it.

Selection Criteria

The wellness committee and I agreed on five criteria before looking at options; agreeing on them first kept enthusiasm for any one idea from settling the matter. The first was strength of evidence: whether controlled studies show the program changes how children travel or how active they are. The second was fit with the causes found in Module 1, especially parents' need for supervision. The third was feasibility, meaning whether the school and its partners could deliver the program with the people and time available. The fourth was cost, since the school has no budget line for this work. The fifth was reach, or how many children the program could plausibly serve, including kindergarten through second grade students whose parents are least willing to let them walk alone.

Option 1: Walk to School Day Events

Many schools join the annual International Walk to School Day or hold monthly walking days with music and small prizes. These events are cheap, popular and easy to organize, and they send a visible message that the school values walking. Their weakness for Linden Park is fit. A single day does not solve the daily problem of parents who cannot walk with their children, and the evidence that occasional events change everyday travel is thin. Events may be useful as a launch or celebration but not as the main program.

Option 2: Remote Drop-Off

In a remote drop-off program, parents who drive leave children at a supervised point a few blocks away, and children walk the rest of the way with staff. This reduces congestion at the school and adds a short walk to each child's morning. It fits parents who must drive to work anyway. However, the walk is short, it requires staff at the drop-off point every day, and it does little for families living within a mile, who are the majority. It could complement a larger program but would not reach the children with the most walking potential.

Option 3: Classroom Activity Breaks

Short activity breaks during lessons are a well-supported way to add minutes of activity to the school day, and teachers can run them with little training. They address the physical activity outcome directly. They do not, however, address anything families told us about: the morning rush, traffic or safety. They would also sit with teachers who are already stretched. Activity breaks are worth promoting through the school's wellness policy but are not the answer to the problem this assessment defined.

Option 4: The Walking School Bus

A walking school bus is a group of children who walk to school along a fixed route with trained adults, picking up children at set stops and times like a bus. It supplies exactly what parents said was missing: a trusted adult and a group. The evidence is also the strongest of the four options. In a pilot cluster randomized trial with 149 fourth graders at eight Houston schools, Mendoza et al. (2011) found that children at intervention schools raised the share of trips made by active commuting from 23.8% to 54% within five weeks, while control children's share fell from 40.2% to 32.6%; intervention children's daily minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity also rose while control children's fell. A larger trial followed 418 students at 22 schools serving lower-income families in Houston and Seattle over a full school year and found significant gains for the intervention group in the percentage of days children commuted actively and in daily minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity (Johnson et al., 2024). A review of 12 studies with 9,169 children concluded that walking school buses were associated with more walking to school and higher activity, though not always significantly, and named volunteer recruitment and time as the main barriers (Smith et al., 2015).

Comparing the Options

Against the five criteria, the walking school bus ranks first on evidence, fit and reach, since routes can serve most of the one-mile zone and younger children can join with an adult. It ranks lower on feasibility and cost because it needs reliable adults every morning. Walk to school days rank first on cost and feasibility but last on evidence and fit. Remote drop-off is moderate on most criteria but reaches the wrong families. Activity breaks are strong on evidence for activity but miss the problem the community named. The walking school bus is the only option that addresses the most important and most changeable cause found in Module 1, the lack of supervision, and that decides the choice. Walk to school days will be kept as a launch event and a monthly celebration.

Core Components to Preserve

Card et al. (2011) describe adaptation as a structured process that keeps a program's core components, the elements believed to make it work, while changing features that do not fit the new setting. Reading the trials closely suggests four core components. The first is adult supervision on every walk; the trials used trained adults, and parents at Linden Park said supervision is their condition for participation. The second is a fixed route with set stops and times, which makes the program predictable enough for families to rely on. The third is frequency; the Houston pilot offered walks up to five days a week, and a program that runs only occasionally is closer to an event than a bus. The fourth is a coordinator: the Seattle pilot that raised walking at a low-income school relied on a part-time coordinator working with parent volunteers (Mendoza et al., 2009), and the review identified volunteer recruitment as the point where programs fail (Smith et al., 2015). Linden Park's version will keep all four.

Adaptable Features and the Changes Made

Other features can change. The trials walked mainly with older elementary students; Linden Park will open routes to all grades, with a smaller group size for routes carrying kindergarten students. The trials relied on research staff or paid walkers; Linden Park will combine a coordinator paid through a small grant with screened volunteers from the parent group, a nearby senior center and the high school's service club, since early work shifts rule out many parents. Routes will be planned around the arterial crossing, with the eastern route timed to meet a crossing guard the city has been asked to add in the mornings. Materials and sign-up forms will be in English and Spanish, and a Spanish-speaking volunteer will lead the eastern route. The program will run four mornings a week at first, with Wednesday reserved for training and catch-up, and will expand to five when enough volunteers are trained. The schedule will include a winter plan, since the trials were in Houston and Seattle rather than a Midwestern January.

Following the Adaptation Steps

Card et al. (2011) set out seven steps: learn the program, assess the new setting, decide what needs changing, consult experts and stakeholders, make changes, pilot the adapted program and finalize it. This paper has covered the first three. For consultation, the adapted design will go to the wellness committee, two parents from each route's neighborhood, the city traffic engineer and the district's risk manager. The pilot will run one route for four weeks before all three routes open, allowing the team to test stops, timing and volunteer scheduling. Each change made after the pilot will be recorded along with its reason, so that the evaluation can tell whether the program as delivered still held its core components.

Conclusion

Four options were compared on criteria drawn from the Module 1 assessment, and the walking school bus was selected because it answers parents' central barrier and rests on the strongest evidence. Adapting it for Linden Park means keeping supervision, fixed routes, frequency and coordination while changing ages served, staffing, languages, route timing and the schedule. Module 3 will turn this adapted program into a goal, measurable objectives and a set of activities.

References

Card, J. J., Solomon, J., & Cunningham, S. D. (2011). How to adapt effective programs for use in new contexts. Health Promotion Practice, 12(1), 25-35. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524839909348592

Johnson, A. M., Zhou, C., Haviland, M., & Mendoza, J. A. (2024). Evaluation of a walking school bus program: A cluster randomized controlled trial. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 21, Article 55. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12966-024-01602-w

Mendoza, J. A., Levinger, D. D., & Johnston, B. D. (2009). Pilot evaluation of a walking school bus program in a low-income, urban community. BMC Public Health, 9, Article 122. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-9-122

Mendoza, J. A., Watson, K., Baranowski, T., Nicklas, T. A., Uscanga, D. K., & Hanfling, M. J. (2011). The walking school bus and children's physical activity: A pilot cluster randomized controlled trial. Pediatrics, 128(3), e537-e544. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2010-3486

Smith, L., Norgate, S. H., Cherrett, T., Davies, N., Winstanley, C., & Harding, M. (2015). Walking school buses as a form of active transportation for children: A review of the evidence. Journal of School Health, 85(3), 197-210. https://doi.org/10.1111/josh.12239