Three checklists, one purpose
The first walk to school alone, without the dread.
You have decided your child is ready. What is left is logistics: what you agree the night before, what goes in the bag, how you know they arrived, and what you do on the morning they are twenty minutes late. Each of these is a checklist here. Print them.
Every page prints cleanly: File → Print, no header or footer.
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The first week
A day-by-day plan from "you walk together" to "they walk alone", plus what to carry and the arrival routine.
Open the checklist → -
If your child is late
A calm escalation plan in ten-minute steps, so you know what to do before you need to.
Open the plan → -
The family agreement
A one-page agreement to fill in together: route, times, rules, what to do if. The children's version of the plan.
Open the agreement →
Who this is for
Parents of children roughly eight to twelve who are about to start walking, scooting or biking to school on their own, and want the first weeks to be uneventful. The pages assume you have already chosen and walked the route; if you have not, that comes first.
The First Walk is made by the team behind Geopapa, a family locator app. That is a commercial interest and we say so on every page; the checklists are written to work with or without any app. This is not the Safe Routes to School program and not a county or school site, although the domain belonged to the program's Lane County site until 2025. More about the domain and about us.