Action 1: Bike Skills in Schools

Education

Oct 28

Let’s ensure that each child can bike to school by the time they enter middle school.

Second-grade students at BJM Elementary School line up for their PE bike skills class. (Photo: Bike Walk Tompkins)

About This Action

Bicycling is a skill that unlocks a lifetime of mobility and independence, in addition to the fun and health benefits. Children are a key audience for bicycling skills classes, and introducing bicycling at all elementary schools in Tompkins County ensures that all children can learn to bike regardless of their circumstances at home.

Physical education teachers and school administrators are important collaborators to start bike programs and procurement of equipment and maintenance, to ensure that all children have the opportunity to learn how to bike. BWT supported Beverly J. Martin Elementary School in their first-ever bike program for second-grade students in 2019, where students learned to bike without training wheels. Expanding the program to other schools, and streamlining the storage and maintenance of bicycles, are the next steps to follow up the successful program.

Street riding skills curriculum should be developed for fifth-graders to further empower children to be more independent, especially as they prepare to go to middle school. In a community where bicycling is for everyone, children as young as 10 years old should be able to ride safely and independently to and from their neighborhood school. Additional reinforcement of bicycling skills should also be offered in middle and high school, much like the bicycling program being offered at Dryden Middle School. Providing bicycling programming at all levels of the public education system will require the building of district-wide institutional support.

A class of BJM second-grade students pose before heading over across the street to the GIAC Park. (Photo: Bike Walk Tompkins)

Increasing Equity

Access to transportation is often a barrier for students who want to participate in co-curricular and extracurricular activities in school, which can start or end outside of school bus service hours. A survey of Ithaca High School students revealed that 45% of respondents “would be more involved in activities if transportation were not an obstacle,” and 10% reported that their family had no working vehicle. Bicycling is a skill that dramatically increases transportation access for people at almost any age, particularly youth who do not have access to a car due to age or household situation. Bicycling can also be combined with other modes of transportation such as TCAT buses to help students go further.

Introducing bicycling at all elementary schools in the county will help address this systemic age and class-based transportation inequity, and make headway in addressing racial disparities when it comes to knowledge of bicycling skills recently observed among adults who responded to the 2020 Ithaca Bicycle Use and Attitudes Survey.

Bart Auble, Educator for Inclusion at ICSD, in the BJM storage room with new kids’ bikes. (Photo: Bike Walk Tompkins)

Let’s Make It Happen

Are you an educator or administrator in a local school interested in starting a bicycling program? Let’s talk and see how Bike Walk Tompkins can support you.

Are you part of a parent-teacher association, a bicycle instructor, or an organization interested in supporting schools on their way to start and continue their bike programs? Contact us with your idea or request.