RULE 7 | PUSH FOR LOCAL SCHOOLS

WALKABLE WICHITA: LESSONS FROM JEFF SPECK

BY RAMI STUCKY

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Southeast High School needed improvements. Floors were cracked. Doorways had warped. Toilets were broken, and ceiling tiles leaked.[1] It was overcrowded, beyond its ideal capacity, with nearly 1,650 students.[2] It needed a new gym, a new fine arts facility, athletic fields, and expanded parking.[3] The school board could either refurbish the school, located at Edgemoor and Lincoln. Or, it could build a new one on 127^th and Pawnee. In June 2013, board members voted unanimously to do the latter.[4] It was a decision that profoundly impacted students, parents, and the city, undermining individuals’ ability to walk to the school.

In 2012, 675 students at Southeast (about 43 percent) lived less than 2.5 miles from its location at 903 S. Edgemoor. About one-third of those students regularly walked.[5] For Don Landis, spokesperson for the group Save Southeast, this was a benefit. Kids had a chance to participate in after-school activities. Parents without automobile access could better reach the school when needed.[6] Tardies could be avoided, argued Gil Alvarez, USD 259’s assistant superintendent of secondary schools, because students had the opportunity to walk if they missed the bus or did not have a ride.[7]

Plus, notes Jeff Speck, urban planner and author of Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places, “walking to school has been shown to improve both academic performance and well-being, as well as public health.” Schools are playgrounds and community centers. It is the “primary vehicle through which families get to know each other and form a circle of friends.”[8] Little wonder that State Representative Jim Ward protested the move. “Schools are a key part of any community. This is important not only for the school board but the entire city of Wichita. You could create a whole section of the city that will die, it will just go away, if decision-makers look just at cost and nothing else,” he cautioned.[9]

While the old Southeast was conveniently located at Edgemoor and Lincoln, the new location deprived students of the ability to walk. When it opened, only about 128 students (about 9 percent) lived within 2.5 miles of the school. Usually, this means such students would not be offered busing and would be required to walk or find their transportation. However, since the area lacks sidewalks or otherwise requires students to walk on a roadway where the posted speed is above 40 miles per hour, these students qualified for what the school district calls “hazardous-route” busing.[10]  This was not atypical. In 2016, about 3,600 students in the district required hazardous-route transportation. Such numbers had increased nearly 40 percent over the previous five years, particularly as the district opened new schools in remote areas. In 2016, only 250 students lived within 2.5 miles of Heights High School. But they could not safely walk to school, and the district was forced to provide busing to all of them.[11]

Transportation costs have increased as a result. In 2018, the school district paid Wichita Transit $126,000 to operate three buses in the morning and afternoon that transport students to the new Southeast High School.[12] Southeast also required the operation of 47 regular school buses, the second most in the district.[13] Wichitans had predicted this cost impact. Writing to the Wichita Eagle amidst the relocation discussions, one resident offered advice on how USD 259 could reduce its $27 million busing cost: “How about starting with making wise, logical, forward-thinking decisions, such as leaving Southeast High where it is and not building a school in a location that automatically forces an increase in transportation costs?”[14]

Several residents were also concerned with more than just the budget. They even speculated that the new location’s lack of walkability impacted graduation rates at Southeast. In 2013, it was 78 percent. But by 2018, it fell to 65.4 percent. Chase Billingham, a sociologist at Wichita State University, noted how attendance rates at the new location were relatively high and that graduation was already declining well before the move. He cites the district’s stringent disciplinary sanctions as impacting students more than location.[15]

However, the new location certainly did not help either. “I know a lot of people who walk to school, and for them it would be a lot harder. I feel like a lot of people wouldn’t be able to do the after-school programs because they wouldn’t have ways to get to and from school,” speculated one Southeast student before the relocation occurred. [16] Alvarez echoed those concerns, noting how “if a kid now does not make the bus and doesn’t have a car to get there, it’s not walking distance.”[17] Even residents chimed in. “No wonder the absentee rate is so high,” notes Marilyn DeBoer in a letter to the editor of the Eagle. “There is limited residential development near the school, whereas the old Southeast High was probably the centerpiece of the fully developed neighborhood it served … No one seems to care how early these kids may need to get up so they don’t miss the school bus, which is possibly their only way to go those seven miles out in the country to the new school. Or how much longer their day is going, those seven miles back home.”[18]

Southeast was not the only high school to relocate from a vibrant, urban, and walkable area to a suburban and rural one. In 2012, Northeast High School moved from 1847 North Chautaqua to 5550 North Lycee in Bel Aire. City council member Brandon Johnson, who attended Northeast, praised the school’s integration within the community at its old location. “If something happened in the morning––if my mom was sick or had to be at work early—I could walk to school and still be on time or slightly late … It was close enough that it was easy to get a friend to take me to school.”[19] Northeast students were similarly discouraged by the move. Kelton Fort put it plainly: “nobody wants to go all the way up to Bel Aire. We chose to come here.”[20] However, despite pushback from the neighborhood’s residents, Northeast moved. Southeast followed soon after. Both relocations placed the schools within areas that were at least 80 percent less dense. 

Cities should understand that “schools belong in neighborhoods,” argues Speck, and “locate them to be walkable and resist the urge to consolidate them into large facilities.”[21]  Although Southeast and Northeast are not as walkable as they once were, Wichita High Schools East, North, and West serve as great inspirations. Among all other Wichita Public High schools, they are located in the densest neighborhoods with the most residences, buildings, and retail surrounding them. Keeping them there is not cheap, either. As of 2025, East and North have cost the district $60 million in repairs over the last three years.[22] But such repairs are necessary. The stories of Southeast and Northeast show what can happen when you rebuild.

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[1] Suzanne Perez Tobias, “Officials Still Deciding on Fate of Southeast High School,” Wichita Eagle, April 6, 2013, 1.

[2] Suzanne Perez Tobias, “Wichita Could Build a New Southeast High Instead of Expanding,” April 8, 2012, 1.

[3] “Public Gets Close Look at Southeast’s Current,” May 13, 2013, 1.

[4] Suzanne Perez Tobias, “Answers to Questions about Plan for Southeast High School,” Wichita Eagle, June 25, 2013.

[5] “The New Southeast High Is Bigger and Better. So Why Is Its Graduation Rate Dropping?,” Wichita Eagle, April 1 29, 2018; Tobias, “Answers to Questions about Plan for Southeast High School.”

[6] Suzanne Perez Tobias, “Southeast High School: Renovate or Build Anew,” Wichita Eagle, April 21, 2013, 1.

[7] “The New Southeast High Is Bigger and Better. So Why Is Its Graduation Rate Dropping?”

[8] Jeff Speck, Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2018), 17.

[9] Suzanne Perez Tobias, “Lawmaker, Wichita Residents to Fight Plan That Could Close Southeast High School,” Wichita Eagle, January 2019.

[10] Tobias, “Answers to Questions about Plan for Southeast High School.”

[11] Suzanne Perez Tobias, “Wichita District Could Eliminate Some Bus Routes, Start Schools Earlier,” Wichita Eagle, March 26, 2016, 1.

[12] Suzanne Perez Tobias, “‘The Start of Something Big’: City Extends Bus Route to Serve Southeast High,” Wichita Eagle, August 27, 2018, 1.

[13] Suzanne Perez Tobias, “Busing Changes for Wichita Schools Could Mean Longer Walks, Earlier Start Times,” Wichita Eagle, June 8, 2018.

[14] “Opinion Line,” Wichita Eagle, May 9, 2016, 1.

[15] Chase M. Billingham, “Southeast’s Grad Rate More about Discipline,” Wichita Eagle, May 10, 2018, 1.

[16] Tobias, “Officials Still Deciding on Fate of Southeast High School.”

[17] “The New Southeast High Is Bigger and Better. So Why Is Its Graduation Rate Dropping?”

[18] “Letters to the Editor,” Wichita Eagle, May 2, 2018.

[19] “The New Southeast High Is Bigger and Better. So Why Is Its Graduation Rate Dropping?”

[20] Suzanne Perez Tobias, “Protesters Gather to Fight Northeast Magnet Closure,” Wichita Eagle, February 24, 2012, 1.

[21] Speck, Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places, 17.

[22] Suzanne Perez, “Repairs to Two Wichita High Schools Have Cost the District Nearly $60 Million — and Counting,” KMUW, April 7, 2025, https://www.kmuw.org/2025-04-07/repairs-to-two-wichita-high-schools-have-cost-the-district-nearly-60-million-and-counting.