Dateline Nashville: Students Spotted Walking to School — Outside!

Today in what's wrong with everything: The Nashville news media is apparently aghast that students at a local high school had to take a walk.

According to WKRN, on the way back from a field trip around 100 students from the Nashville School of the Arts were dropped off about eight-tenths of a mile from school. The students, the station reports, were forced to endure 15 minutes of walking after bus drivers left them at a McDonald's to attend to other routes.

"As the buses left," says anchor Bob Mueller, barely concealing his incredulity, "the only way to get those students back to school was to walk."

WKRN's Nick Caloway did the same walk himself to double-check the school district's half-mile estimate of the journey, which school officials said was within the official "walk zone." Caloway does a pretty good job detailing road conditions that might make what should be a routine activity dangerous. He makes a point of saying the road was "busy" and that one section of sidewalk was closed, though these details are seemingly offered only to strengthen the argument that the students should not have been walking.

How sad that an activity that was commonplace for generations is now completely foreign to much of the U.S. Given the tone of the coverage you'd think these kids flew back from their field trip by flapping their arms.

As for the students, one described the experience as "not fun."

"It was sunny, it was windy," she said.

(Hat tip to Lenore Skenazy at Free Range Kids.)