About this domain

What was here before, and who we are.

The previous site

From about 2013 until 2025 this domain hosted the website of a regional network of the Safe Routes to School program for the Greater Washington area: news from the network, meeting notes, and a library of reports, fact sheets and publications about children walking and biking to school.

That site closed and the domain registration lapsed. We registered it in 2026. We are not affiliated with the Safe Routes to School program, with the Safe Routes Partnership, or with any school district or government body, and this site is not a continuation of the network's work. We did not copy or republish any of its material.

If you are looking for the original reports and resources, the Internet Archive holds copies of the old site, and the national program's own website remains the authoritative source for the program itself.

Who we are

School Route Notes is written and published by the team that makes Geopapa, a family locator app for parents: a parent app and a child app connected by a code, showing the child's latest reported location, a record of the route, and arrival alerts for saved places such as school. The app is free to download and offers in-app purchases.

That is a commercial interest, and it shapes what we write: children walking to school on their own is exactly the moment families consider an app like ours. So we are explicit about it on every page, we name the app only where it is relevant, and we say plainly what it does not do — an app changes what you know afterwards, not how safe a crossing is. Most guides here need no app at all.

We publish practical guides on one narrow subject: the everyday walk, scoot or bike ride to school — planning routes, teaching crossings, organising walking groups, and getting bikes ready. The site has no advertising and loads nothing from third parties; the only outbound links are to our own product, marked as such.

Our guides are general. They are not legal advice, and local rules on crossings, sidewalk riding and school arrival differ between the District, Maryland, Virginia and individual schools. Where a local rule matters we say so and point to whom to ask.

Old links

Links to pages of the previous site (the /resources/ library, news posts by date) now lead here rather than to an error page, so that anyone following an old bookmark understands what happened. If you hold the rights to material from the old site and would like the archive reference removed from this page, write to us.

Contact

support@geopapa.com — the same address as for the app. Corrections, questions, and notes on anything a guide gets wrong for your street are welcome.