Safe Routes to School has expanded into high schools — join us! Thanks to grants from Oregon Department of Transportation and Metro, we're able to offer our Transportation Academy to high school students in Portland.
What is the Transportation Academy?
The Transportation Academy is a multidisciplinary unit that helps students build skills for navigating neighborhoods safely — whether walking, biking, rolling, or driving — while helping students understand of Portland's transportation system in ways that reflect their needs and values. It promotes traffic safety with the goal of eliminating traffic deaths and serious injuries on our streets. Learning extends beyond the classroom, encouraging students to apply these skills in their day-to-day lives.
Student cover a variety of topics in the Transportation Academy unit, including:
- Multimodal literacy: Navigating Portland safely — whether walking, biking, rolling, taking transit, using shared bikes and scooters, or driving a motor vehicle
- Climate connections: Understanding the effects of transportation on the climate
- Transportation equity: Exploring Portland's transportation history and equity impacts
- Civic engagement: Working with city government to influence transportation decisions
- Safe System approach: Identifying and mitigate risks in the transportation system
Who is it designed for?
The Transportation Academy unit is designed for high school students. We partnered with 140+ local youth, Metro, Oregon Department of Transportation, and Dr. Autumn Shafer to inform the Transportation Academy. Safe travel engagements included workshops at Parkrose High School, Alliance High School, and East Portland Community Center, as well as focus groups in all Portland Public School high school clusters. Metro also led focus groups in East Multnomah County, Washington County and Clackamas County.
How does it work?
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!
Current Transportation Academy lessons available to download:
Bike (and other wheels) skills and safety
Climate transportation justice
Final projects in the Transportation Academy
Teacher resources
Train-the-trainer
The Safe Routes to School team does not have the capacity to engage with all 55,000+ students in Portland's 100+ schools across five districts. This is why we designed our program in a creative way to be more sustainable. Through a train-the-trainer teaching model, we help educators become transportation safety experts for their school community. This helps expand our reach beyond what we would be able to do through direct education with students alone.
We provide initial training to teachers, then offer in-class support as teachers begin instructing students. Safe Routes to School staff are available to observe teachers in class, offer feedback, and help respond to questions.
Background
- 2021-22: We started developing the Transportation Academy in partnership with teachers at Alliance High School.
- 2022-23: We 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.
- 2023-24: We started working with Portland Public Schools teachers from Cleveland and McDaniel high schools to pilot our updated Transportation Academy. We continued working with Elevate Oregon teacher-mentors at Parkrose High School. We also continued to develop our youth-driven and youth-oriented curriculum. Youth designed routes for BIKETOWN bike-share group rides and participated in a civic engagement activity to design their ideal street. Two hundred and thirty students participated in Transportation Academy programming.
- 2024-25: To make our Transportation Academy curriculum more relevant and engaging, we brought in the experts! Students in Cleveland High School's Transit to Trails Club and McDaniel High School's Cycling Club participated in focus groups to share feedback on the curriculum. Students shared that the module's Jeopardy! game made the lesson exciting. They also learned how PBOT changes speed limits and builds traffic safety infrastructure. Portland Public Schools district adopted our Transportation Academy curriculum as "supplemental curriculum." Starting summer 2025, Portland Public Schools will promote these units, and we will train interested teachers. One hundred and ten students participated in Transportation Academy programming.
Bring Transportation Academy to your school!
If your school is interested in offering Transportation Academy, please reach out to us at saferoutes@portlandoregon.gov.