A handful of parents and youngsters braved the weather Thursday evening to attend Minot Forest Elementary’s open house for fourth grade.

Minot Forest Principal Joan Seamans gave a brief talk to the parents in attendance in which she described what was on tap for the school year. Among the new initiative at the school is a program called “Safe Routes to School.” Seamans described it as a Massachusetts organization that works with children in “a lot of schools getting children to walk to school.”

“It’s kind of timely because we now have children that are walking to school because they live under that mile,” Seamans said, referring to the new bus policy the district instituted this year.

The policy states that any child living less than one mile from school will not be bused to school except when the weather makes the sidewalks impassable.

In conjunction with the children walking to school, Seamans said, comes an increased focus on physical fitness.

“We may do some walking activities like walking around the school just getting kids in shape,” Seamans said.

Seamans later said the students will go to the YMCA every Friday for swimming lessons, starting on Sept. 11.

Seamans also said the school’s focus this year is on discipline and challenging the children to become better students overall.

“Maybe they need to be challenged more in the English and language arts and their reading,” Seamans said. “We want to make sure that we are … giving them the tools that they need."

Parents were also invited to meet with their children’s teachers. Though the students accompanied their parents, too, and participated in meeting with teachers, Seamans later said she thought the PTA’s Back-To-School event a couple weeks ago was integral in getting the kids comfortable with their teachers before school began.

“It made them so much more comfortable,” Seamans said.