You really ought to walk the route the Keene Board of Education and school officials plan to make some Fuller School students take next fall.

We're talking about the children - some of them 5 and 6 and 7 years old - who live on the streets north of Cheshire Hospital, off upper Court Street. Today, they go to school on a bus. In the early 1970s, the neighborhood was granted a variance to the rule making buses off-limits to children who live less than a mile from school. But the school board has withdrawn the variance, effective next fall.

So in September, those children will walk from their homes to the east side of Court Street, where they will travel the curbless sidewalk that angles down to the heavily traveled road. When they come to the Allen Court crossing, where two branches of that street intersect with the sidewalk, they'll have to run as fast as their little legs can carry them. Cars rarely even slow down when bearing right off Court Street onto Allen Court; it's almost a straight line. If the kids are lucky, some cars may use their directional signals, giving an advance indication that they're planning to make the turn.

Once they have passed Allen Court, though, the children had better slow down. The narrow sidewalk travels over a concrete culvert near the corner of Elm Street, and there's a sharp drop of 20 feet or so leading to a branch of the Ashuelot River. There's a fence there that might stop the fall of a child who was horsing around or who happened to lose his or her footing, as long as that child didn't weigh much. Then again, the fence might not hold; it's one of those wavy fences made up of thin slats.

After passing over the culvert, the children will turn up Elm Street, which leads to the school. They'll walk along the river bank for while, then past a few houses on the left just before they get to the Route 9-10 overpass. If they're not running late, the children may have time to practice their reading skills on the graffiti decorating the overpass supports. Most of the inscriptions might not be appropriate for beginning readers, though, and certainly aren't suitable for a family newspaper. "Eat my shorts" is one of the few we can relay here.

Once out from under the highway, the children will be in sight of the school, which is on the opposite side of the road from their sidewalk.

Whether these children live on Evergreen Avenue, King's Lane, Knoll Avenue or New Acres Road, their trip to school is just a smidgen shorter than a mile.

The parents of some of these children are trying to convince the school board to reinstate the variance and let the children continue riding the bus next fall. That wouldn't cost taxpayers anything extra. The bus must continue to stop on upper Court Street anyway, to pick up children who live more than a mile from school.

But a majority of board members seems reluctant to allow the upper Court Street children to take the bus, because other parents from other neighborhoods might insist on similar treatment. For instance, a group of Harmony Lane parents has protested the somewhat shorter, somewhat less dangerous walk their children must take every day to Fuller School. Those complaints have resulted in a few vulgar wisecracks from people who look down their noses at people who live on Harmony Lane. Meanwhile, some upper Court Street parents are complaining about a busing variance that was granted to Symonds School students who live on Bradford Road. They wonder whether "fancy" sections of town get preferential treatment.

Before the whole city erupts into class or neighborhood warfare, the school board had better reassess its busing policy. It would cost about $22,000 to bus all very young children - kindergartners through 2nd graders - who live more than a half-mile from. In a school budget of $13.6-million, that's a very small price to pay to assure the safety of some very small children. The board shouldn't wait until a tragedy forces it to do the right thing.