Headmaster Adrian Allan had a rougher trip to class than any of his young charges do now at Le Jardin Academy on the Windward side of O'ahu.

Back in England, he trudged down a three-quarter-mile lane each day to catch the first of two buses that eventually got him to prep school as a young student. It was easily an hourlong trek.

Much has changed in the ensuing 50 years; Allan suspects the majority of students coming and going from the Windward private school he leads are hand-delivered by mom or dad.

Not that they wouldn't send them on the bus or via their own steam if they thought they could.

"If they thought it was safe, they'd do it," Allan said.

As traffic grows and fuel costs make extra trips exorbitant, more parents both here and on the Mainland may find themselves weighing how their kids will get to school: Should they walk, ride a bike, take a bus or be driven by an adult?

To ensure that his third-grader, Violet, gets home and back safely, Le Jardin parent Doug Fitch Schwartzsmith often picks her up on a tandem bike.

Fitch, a former pro cyclist, doesn't let Violet venture solo on her bike yet, and calls himself "hypervigilant" about safety.

"We have a ridiculously huge flag that is attached to the bike," he said, adding that he wears "hideously bright colors."

He's also studied traffic patterns on the road and knows how to ride very defensively.

"I am not invulnerable," he said. "I'm not unclear about that."

Asked what parents worry about when sending their children off to school alone, Schwartzsmith started to tick them off one by one: "Pervies … drugs … " before catching himself and adding, "but O'ahu is a pretty darn nice place. People here go out of their way to take care of one another."

SAFETY, INDEPENDENCE

The question of when youngsters should travel without adult supervision is just one of a range of issues confronting parents as children assert their independence. At what age should kids be left home alone? Own a cell phone? Go to a movie with friends?

For many parents, safety trumps independence. But some psychologists worry that kids who never escape the watchful eye of a parent or teacher won't develop the independence to negotiate their world.

Gregory Ramey, a child psychologist and a columnist for the Dayton Daily News in Ohio, said parents wondering whether a child is old enough to walk or bike to school should consider factors such as the child's maturity and whether the route to school involves busy streets.

"There's no certain age," he said. "It depends upon the child and it depends upon the neighborhood."

Many experts say parents' fears of abduction are overblown, a result of intensive media coverage of cases such as the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the British girl who vanished last year while on vacation with her parents in Portugal.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, about 100 American children are kidnapped by strangers a year, a tiny number compared with runaways and children snatched by a parent involved in a custody dispute.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a program to encourage children to walk to school for exercise, though not necessarily without an adult.

"One of the fears that parents expressed was that their children could be harmed or kidnapped," said Jackie Epping, a CDC health scientist. "In fact, more kids are hurt by the cars of parents driving other kids to school — considerably more. The percentage of kids who are nabbed on their way to school is minuscule."

But the fear of abduction persists. Lenore Skenazy, a columnist for the New York Sun, made a splash last spring when she wrote about sending her then 9-year-old son, Izzy, on a solo transit ride from Bloomingdale's to the family's Manhattan apartment a few stops downtown on the subway and a few blocks east on the bus.

"Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence," she wrote. "Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I've told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It's not. It's debilitating — for us and for them."

After the story of the fourth-grader alone on the subway was picked up by media outlets around the world, with Skenazy alternately congratulated and vilified, she started a blog called Free Range Kids, "dedicated to sane parenting."

She usually takes Izzy to school, while he walks home.

"It doesn't require advanced calculus," Skenazy said. "I like him being independent, and I like him to be a little confident and get places by himself."

LONG BUS RIDE

Voyager School mom Uilani Chow-Rule has also worked with her son to foster his ability to commute independently.

She has let her son, Kamalama Kaikuana, 14, catch TheBus since he was 9 — though not without bucking some homegrown trepidation.

"A lot of parents raised their eyebrows at me," said Chow-Rule: " 'Are you crazy? How can you let a kid do this?'

"There I was, working at the Waianae Comprehensive, and he goes to school in town. How am I going to do this?"

First, the single mom bought her son a cell phone and taught him how to use it. Then, she took off a few days to show him the route to school and back. Plus, Chow-Rule said, Grandpa lives in town, and if something went amiss, he could step in.

She had watched for signs that Kamalama was independent enough to make the trip himself: "I saw that he could do things on own."

For example, he grew comfortable going to a nearby store to get some milk, and was able to spend free time, unsupervised, without problems.

The first week was not without incident — he missed a transfer and caught a different bus — but he called his mom, who told him to get off at the next stop and walk to a corner to get his bearings. Grandpa was called, and mom was, of course, having an anxious moment.

"My heart rate was going 110 percent, but I was very calm," Chow-Rule recalled. "I told him to go home. … I was freaking out at home, but couldn't show him my true emotion, fear."

Once her son figured it out, the now-teen realized a level of competence and independence that serves him well.

"He knows all the bus routes," Chow-Rule said. "I say, can you meet me there? It's a wonderful thing. It's given him a kind of confidence. Like, 'I can do this.' "