01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, September 14, 2005

The public-school systems of Scituate, Bristol, Tiverton and elsewhere in the region have increasingly taken to heart, largely on their own, the idea that new schools should be near the students who attend them. In most places in modern America, this presumably obvious axiom has gotten short shrift.

How easy it has been for a school committee to go to the municipal voters and say that a new school may be built on cheap land out on the fringes of town or otherwise distant from most of the school's students. So, increasingly over the decades, public schools have emerged in outlying areas.

It saves a buck at the beginning, but the problems down the road (as it were) catch up in the end.

Perhaps most directly, busing a growing percentage of pupils to school has not saved money. It costs dearly, year after year -- and not just in budgetary terms. Students must rise earlier, as must their parents. Extracurricular activities become more complicated, and disruptive of family life. Some students even have to reduce participation in such activities, with parents' placing limits on them, for reasons practical or selfish.

This only begins to list the problems caused by constructing schools far from the students they serve. Broader social problems ensue, including those under the rubric sprawl. A big one is the pollution and national energy insecurity brought about by the country's reliance on motor vehicles, as exacerbated by dispersed, non-neighborhood schools.

For many such reasons, Tiverton's citizens voted last year to force their school committee to repair several of the town's older schools, rather than build a big new one on a distant plot of land. They were wise to do so.

And so we applaud the Rhode Island Department of Education for adding to its School Facility Planning Guidelines incentives for school districts to implement such "smart growth" ideas as building new schools closer to the center of town.

The move coincides with a federal program that will invest $612 million over five years to improve safety for children who walk or bicycle to school. If more Rhode Island school districts build schools to which students can walk or bike, Rhode Island can better tap into that resource.

Saving money is always a municipal goal, but troubling societal trends are more likely to be addressed if cities and towns emphasize (or, really, re-emphasize) traditional concepts that Americans seem to have forgotten. Leading among them is the sense of community: the socializing and stabilizing effects of people's living and going to school in real neighborhoods.

The Rhode Island Education Department, in helping local districts build new schools, is to be applauded for promoting such "smart-growth" policies.