Student Cyclists Roll, With 16 New Bikes

As temperatures dropped and a bitter wind bore down on Tuesday afternoon, a few dozen cyclists suited up in jackets and gloves, and filled the streets leading to East Rock Park. Coursing down Livingston Street, they breezed past Willow and Canner, hooked right onto Cold Spring, and circled back to Eagle, where their three-mile journey had begun.

The ages of the speedsters? Nine and 10 years old.

These young cyclists are all members of the East Rock School Bike Club, an afterschool program for fourth and fifth graders at the neighborhood global magnet school. They were trying out their new fleet of 16 bikes, which now adds to the ten the club had been using the last couple of years. 

The school was able to purchase the brand new Jamis XR24s and Laser 20s from the Devil’s Gear Bike Shop downtown thanks to a collaboration among the school’s front office, the parent teacher organization (PTO), the local education and advocacy group New Haven Coalition for Active Transportation (NCAT), and East Rock/Fair Haven Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith. Together, they helped the school apply for a $5,000 state Department of Transportation Safe Routes to School Grant, which financed the purchase.

To celebrate the new acquisitions, the kids from the Bike Club gathered in the school’s gymnasium on Tuesday for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Also in attendance were Principal Sabrina Breland, PTO President Anna Ruth Pickett, middle school teacher Stephanie Boeher, NCAT Bike Education Coordinator Elias Estabrook, and Alder Smith. 

In place of a traditional ribbon, which had gone missing, the group used a huge pair of red scissors to cut a neon yellow bike vest. The vest snipped cleanly and fell to the floor as the students clapped and cheered and jumped up and down. 

“Part of why I admire this program so much is because it’s building skills to allow kids to fall in love with biking and fall in love with that as a way to get around,” said Smith, who joined for the ride to the park herself on her own racing bike after the ceremony. 

Before they went outside and lined up to hit the road, the kids raced to the lineup of new bikes arranged like dominoes one after the other in the middle of the gym, threw helmets on, and started doing laps around the basketball court. 

Building cycling infrastructure is one thing, but to make that infrastructure useful, a city needs a cycling culture, says Joel LaChance, a retired New Haven Public Schools teacher and bike shop owner. He’s been locally advocating for cycling for decades and volunteers regularly with local school programs. The know-how starts with clubs and classes like the one at East Rock School, he said. 

Now, the city has a plan in the works to create universal bike access and cycling instruction for the district’s second graders, driving a mobile locker of bikes from school to school a few times a week. That’s according to NCAT’s Estabrook, who participated in the city’s implementation meetings for the program. NCAT’s army of volunteers will be working with school physical education teachers to implement a curriculum based off of the first-in-the-nation one developed in Washington, D.C., back in 2015. 

On Tuesday, Pickett looked on from the bleachers, watching students with their new bikes. In addition to having a sixth grader and an eighth grader enrolled at the school, she’s a cycling fanatic herself.

Since her kids were babies, Pickett said, every year she’s taken them on New Haven’s Rock to Rock Earth Day ride. She’s also among the 2.5 percent of the city’s residents who bike to work every day — a rate of residents higher than any other city in the state.

“The city is really committed to providing safe routes for bikers and to making it even better than when I moved here in 2008,” she said.

Later, as the young cyclists wound their way back to campus after taking their new bikes out for a ride through East Rock, they encountered their first cars on the road. Cascading down the line of cyclists, each yelled ​“fall back!” and ​“keep right!” to alert their peers of the incoming four-wheelers. Once past the cars, the fleet caught the steep hill leading to the school parking lot and coasted down.

“When you come back, it’s so fast,” said Malachi, a fourth grader in his first year of the program, after whizzing down the slope. ​“I just like it.”