Shuffle to Buffalo

By Cori Bolger

The Lake Oswego Review, Nov 22, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009

SUBMITTED PHOTO / The Lake Oswego Review

Hockey players from the Portland Winter Hawks team, from left, Scott Gabriel, Viktor Sjodin, Ryan Kerr and Jake Dietrich high-five students at Oak Creek Elementary during a visit to the school last week as part of the “The Shuffle to Buffalo” program.

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There’s no doubt about it – it’s a long, long way from Lake Oswego to Buffalo, N.Y.

By Mapquest’s estimations, it would take a roadtripper about 39 hours to drive the 2,651 miles between the two cities. By plane, a good five hours in the air plus a layover if you’re leaving out of Portland International Airport.

And by foot? Well, the 372 students at Oak Creek Elementary figured out that 5,302,000 steps gets you there by paved road, but swimming across Lake Michigan and Lake Erie makes the trip go much faster.

But, they realized they could get really cold in the 43-degree water.

So during one portion of their recent “movement” program, “The Shuffle to Buffalo,” they took out scooter boards in gym class and “swam” their way across the lakes.

As soon as they hit the shore of Lake Erie, they knew they had reached their final destination, though it wasn’t in plain sight.

The kids’ trip across the U.S. in “The Shuffle to Buffalo” – co-created by Oak Creek physical education teacher Louise Gaustad and her 25-year-old son Paul Gaustad – started at the school Oct. 1. Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon donated pedometers, which were worn by students during recess and measured how many steps the students took while they played, skipped and ran.

Their goal – which they met last week – was to make it from Lake Oswego to Buffalo by Thanksgiving. Louise traveled to Buffalo Wednesday to complete the journey and watch Paul play center for the Buffalo Sabres professional hockey team. A Beaverton High School graduate, Paul played for the Portland Winter Hawks as a teenager.

“My son and I designed this program just as an incentive to get kids moving so that activity becomes a lifestyle and to fight youth diseases,” Louise said. “This project has many objectives: get kids moving, raise their awareness of their personal activity, set goals and use the pedometers as a tool for moving.”

Each day, parent volunteers tallied the steps, calculated the miles walked and added to the red line slowly stretching across the U.S. map posted at the school. Two thousand steps equal one mile; their 2 millionth step took them into Iowa.

Originally, Louise geared the project toward the first and second graders. But a few weeks into the “Shuffle,” the fifth and sixth graders chipped in their steps from a required monthly 9-minute run to help the younger kids meet their goal. The third and fourth graders also helped out by walking across Wisconsin during gym class.

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