Bike Clark County volunteers want kids to be skilled, secure on 2 wheels

Always review your ABCs before you hop on your bicycle. ABCs means air, brakes and chain.

What, you forgot that starter lesson from years or decades ago? Or never had any bicycle safety instruction? Or grew up without a bike?

All of that is what Bike Clark County wants to remedy. The homegrown nonprofit agency aims to make bikes and helmets available to children who can’t afford them — sometimes by learning their way to earning a bike — and to provide their earliest lessons in the rules of the road.

They’ll use those rules for the rest of their lives, said Bike Clark County board member Peter Van Tilburg. It’s a strong point to make when you’re selling too-cool-for-school kids on taking bike safety in health-physical education classes: Just consider it the start of driver education. What middle-schooler isn’t eager for that?

Middle-schoolers might be the biggest bike riders on the planet, Van Tilburg said. They’re the ones cycling to school, to the store, to friends’ houses. Younger kids tag along with their parents; older ones start driving themselves. So middle school is the right time to program them for a lifetime of safety on the street, Van Tilburg said.

Such lessons are definitely needed, Discovery Middle School P.E. teacher Sherrie Robb said on a recent morning before class.

“There’s a big push to get bikes and bike safety back into schools, and I’m glad,” Robb said. “I see kids on bikes and skateboards without any helmets, doing crazy things” such as sealing their ears with earbuds while traveling busy city streets. That’s a seriously bad idea, she said.

Van Tilburg and fellow volunteer Joe Greulich were on hand that morning. They helped Robb’s students properly fit helmets and do ABC checks. The group rode around the gymnasium after Robb reviewed other basics, including hand signals. Then it was down the hill and around Kiggins Bowl for outdoor riding practice.

“This is not the X-Games,” Robb said. “No popping wheelies!”

Fleets and helmets

This fleet of 30 bikes belongs to Vancouver Public Schools, which won a grant with Bike Clark County’s help; the grant also paid for a few P.E. teachers, including Robb, to take the bike-safety training themselves. BCC also has two more 30-bike fleets of its own, Van Tilburg said, which it transports here and there by trailer for student practice.

BCC’s volunteer mechanics also refurbish used bikes, sometimes mentoring young cyclists for weeks and rewarding their efforts with their own free, fixed-it-myself bikes at the end of the process. That could be the happy ending to a tragedy for 13-year-old Jashua Santillan, who took Robb’s class despite his own bike getting stolen recently, he said.

Thanks to community donations, BCC also routinely distributes free helmets everywhere it goes.

“In 2015, we gave out 196 bikes and over $4,000 in helmets,” Van Tilburg said.

Robb’s BCC-supported bike-safety unit ended up providing lessons and practice for 11 P.E. classes and around 275 students, she said.

“Not only were the kids saying ‘thank you’ — which doesn’t happen in any other unit — but I even had two parents send emails” of thanks, she wrote later.

Spinning up

Volunteers such as Greulich were bringing safety lessons to local middle schools long before Bike Clark County formed to speed the effort, formalizing as a nonprofit agency, and going after grants and donations to support many programs and efforts.

The main driver of all that has been Eric Giacchino, a “total bike guy” who has enjoyed the handy cycling infrastructure of European cities, he has said, and wishes the U.S. would catch up.

There’s more than that to his passion for bike safety and education. Giacchino is a father and a Vancouver firefighter-paramedic, a first responder who swoops in when accidents happen.

“In my line of work, I’m the guy who sometimes picks kids up off the street,” he told The Columbian a few years back. “Kids don’t know how to tangle with traffic. I can’t live with that. I’ve seen the most horrible things.”

Van Tilburg, who used to race but now loves tandem riding with his teen daughter, got involved in Bike Clark County because he wanted to see safety lessons start at his kids’ schools in Hazel Dell. The group hasn’t quite spun up fast enough for that, he noted — but it’s spinning.

Bike Clark County’s safety program is regular at Discovery and McLoughlin middle schools, but it will travel to any school where it’s invited. Its new Bike Skills 101 summer camps for kids ages 6 to 10 and 10 to 14 proved popular in 2015, and will be even bigger and better this July and August, Giacchino said. That’s a team effort with Vancouver Parks and Recreation and the Fort Vancouver historic site, where the camps are held.

The all-volunteer group also strives to hold open shops from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. every Thursday at its borrowed warehouse space at 1602 Main St. All are welcome for help and instruction. All that takes is enough volunteers to make it happen, Van Tilburg said. New volunteers are always welcome.

Fourth Plain plans

Bike Clark County is also working with the city, Clark County Public Health and Vancouver Public Schools on a project aimed at healthier living and a healthier, safer environment in one of our most impoverished local corridors: the west end of Fourth Plain Boulevard. Fourth Plain Forward won a $250,000 grant from Kaiser Permanente late last year.

BCC’s piece of the project will begin an eight-week High School Bicycle Leadership program at Hudson’s Bay High School this fall and at Fort Vancouver High School in the spring.

“We want to develop bike stewards” who become young leaders as they master bike mechanics and traffic safety, Van Tilburg said. They’ll earn their own bikes, helmets and locks by completing the curriculum. And they’ll emerge with saleable skills, he added.

Maybe they’ll be able to put those skills to work at the permanent, cooperative, staffed shop of which Bike Clark County has long dreamt. BCC has long been a charity child, storing its fleet and holding its workshops in the emptied-out tank of the former Hough Pool, then moving to a Main Street space volunteered by Burgerville and its Center for Responsible Community Leadership.

“It’s time for a bicycle shop,” Giaccino wrote in the most recent BCC newsletter. “We need a space where kids can have access to bicycle services, where volunteers can easily plug into our projects, and where the community can come use our tools for their own bicycles.” Ideally that shop would be somewhere along that Fourth Plain corridor, where it’s needed most.

BCC’s model is Portland’s Community Cycling Center, whose 2015 budget was $1.4 million, according to its annual report.

Bike Clark County’s annual budget, made up almost entirely of donations, is something like $10,000, Van Tilburg said.

“We’re still in our infancy,” he said. “Our goal is to open a real bike shop like the Community Cycling Center’s shop.”