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Transportation Academy

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This image shows the words "Transportation Academy" on a brown background.
The Portland Bureau of Transportation's Safe Routes to School program's Transportation Academy offers transportation education to high school students in Parkrose School District and Portland Public Schools respectively.
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What is the Transportation Academy?

In 2022, PBOT Safe Routes to School staff started training Parkrose High School Elevate Oregon teacher-mentors to lead the Transportation Academy. Elevate Oregon is an organization that builds relationships with at-risk youth to promote education, self-reliance, and leadership with Parkrose students. In 2023, we started our second and final year of the grant.

In 2023, PBOT Safe Routes to School started working with Portland Public Schools teachers from Cleveland and McDaniel high schools to pilot our updated Transportation Academy.

How it works

These partnerships encourage growth beyond the classroom and into students’ day-to-day lives. The Transportation Academy's curriculum is Topics covered in the Transportation Academy include:

  • Multimodal literacy - getting around Portland by walking, biking, rolling, taking transit, shared micromobility, and driver safety
  • Climate connections - effect of transportation on climate
  • Transportation equity - Portland transportation history 
  • Civic engagement - working with city government
  • Safe System – ways to address and mitigate risks in our transportation system

These educational efforts not only increase students’ knowledge of options to get around their neighborhoods and city, but are also designed to increase pedestrian, biker, and driver safety, with the goal of reducing fatal and serious crashes.

This Academy was highly informed by previous safe travel engagements with over 140 Portland Metro youth, in partnership with Metro Safe Routes to School, ODOT, and Dr. Autumn Shafer.

Safe travel engagements included:

  • Workshops at Parkrose High School, Alliance High School, and East Portland Community Center
  • Focus groups in all Portland Public School high school clusters, including East Multnomah County, Washington County and Clackamas County focus groups led by Metro partners

Transportation Academy curriculum

The Transportation Academy is in the process of evolving into its final form so keep in mind that the material you find below may change!

Transportation Academy lessons available to download: 

Bring Transportation Academy to your school

If your school is interested in a Transportation Academy unit to be taught. Please reach out to saferoutes@portlandoregon.gov.

For more information, please reach out to us at saferoutes@portlandoregon.gov