Celebrating WINS with Tracey Roberts

Tracey Wilkinson, P&C President and Your Move Champion at Willeton Primary was jumping for joy when she found out they won the Get Online with Your Move competition.

Willetton PS won a wopping 1,000 points (aka $1,000+ worth of rewards) simply by being the lucky Your Move school drawn out of a hat on Car Free Day 2017. We asked Tracey a few questions to celebrate her leadership and achievements at Willetton Primary.

What made you get Willetton Primary involved with Your Move?
I wanted to learn how to support and encourage our school community to choose active transport options over their cars.

Why do you think it's important to encourage kids to walk, ride or scoot to school?
From personal experience, I know that the more time my children are outside being active the happier and healthier they are. Active children are healthier, happy children learn better; there's really no down-side! It still amazes me that even just a 10 minute walk to school can settle the "hurry-up-we-are-going-to-be-late" morning stress for all of us. I hope that we're establishing habits so our children's first instinct is to walk or ride rather than jump in the car for short trips.

What do you think stops people from walking, riding or scooting to school more often?
Every family's situation is different but many parents drop children at school and then drive straight to work. I'd love to do an experiment to test how much time this saves though! I have a hypothesis that riding to school and then back home before driving to work would take barely more time than maneuvering through the school car park congestion AND see you arrive at your destination a bit happier for the exercise!

What do you think you will 'spend' your 1000 bonus points on?
We'd love to have some dedicated scooter racks at the school and perhaps organise the bike education classes we have been discussing for 2 years now! Willetton Primary assembly item where students ‘walked’ along to "500 miles" by the Proclaimers and Nancy Sinatra’s "These boots are made for walkin".