Our Safe Routes to School Program Continues to Thrive

The 2022-2023 school year has been the most successful year to date for our Education and Safe Routes To School program.  We’ve taught more students (over 900!) at more schools (12) than ever before!  We’ve supported more schools in holding off-campus bike, walk, and roll to school events and have begun building conversations with parents at several schools about starting ongoing walking school buses or bicycle trains.

We’ve set the bar high for the next school year and we received great news this Spring that will enable us to keep the momentum going. First, Durham County awarded Bike Durham with a $175,000 grant of federal funds to expand our programming over the next two years. Then, Durham Public Schools was awarded federal grant funds through State’s Safe Routes To School program. The combination of these resources puts us in a position to hire more staff to deepen our relationships with individual schools and with DPS administration.  We expect to make great strides in educating students in biking and walking safety that more and more will be able to practice on their way to school. 

2022-2023 Recap

We had ambitious plans at the beginning of the school year: offer our 4-weeks-long program to students at 12 DPS Elementary and to have 6 end-of-class celebrations throughout the year.  The response from Physical Education (PE) coaches and principals was tremendous, and we held classes at the following elementary schools: Merrick Moore, E.K. Powe, W.G Pearson, Pearsontown, Eastway, Fayetteville, Lakewood, Y.E. Smith, Glenn, C.C. Spaulding, Burton, and Eno Valley.

​​Due to our consistently lousy weekend weather conditions, we were only able to hold four end-of-class celebrations. These events are celebrations of bike safety activities, where all students at the schools, and their families are invited to participate on a Saturday.  We always love seeing those that just attended the bike safety class program take the lead in showing others what they’ve learned: peer-to-peer instruction at its finest!

All of the PE coaches have been super to work with, however there are two standouts - Coach Watson at Eastway and Coach Wilson at Merrick-Moore - who we showered with love and praise at our first ever PE teacher's recognition event.  Durham Public Schools, the City of Durham, and the Bike Durham staff celebrated the efforts made by our community school leaders to bring bike safety classes to their classrooms, gyms, and playgrounds.

This school year was also good in terms of Bike, Walk & Roll events, as in October 2022, 19 Elementary schools held events, celebrating the benefits of biking and walking to school, and the importance of safe access to the school infrastructure. These events also help to establish and strengthen social connections between families, schools, and local businesses, reminding us of the crucial and central role of a school in a safe, healthy, and vibrant community.

We feel safe to say that what we are doing in Durham is groundbreaking. We are pushing to expand our programs to as many schools as possible; to expose as many students, teachers, and families to more than just bike safety. We are looking to engage Durham residents of all ages and empower them to walk, bike, and ride transit more often. 

Great things happen when riding bikes and our students can certainly prove it. Nothing feels as cheerful and hopeful as seeing a young student progress through our course, go from hesitancy and uncertainty with balancing on a bike to being able to ride with confidence and to show their friends how far they have gone in such a short period. 

Finally, we are so grateful to the City of Durham for selecting us to manage this program over the past two years, to Jen McDuffie (former board member and volunteer extraordinaire) for having done this work for years and for having the foresight to assist the City in submitting a grant application, and to donors to last year’s Pedals to Possibilities campaign that made our program expansion possible this Spring.

Teaching and Learning Perseverance through Safe Routes to School

Students and families participating in Walk and Bike to School Day in October 2021

We have a little story about perseverance we want to share with you.  On a cheerful sunny morning this past December at Eastway Elementary, we ended a bike riding safety class and Jacopo asked the 3rd grade students what they were proud of that day. One 8-year old girl, who we'll call Jasmine, raised her hand and said, “At last week’s class, I wasn’t good with balancing, but today I started to get it.”  Jasmine’s classmates started to clap and her smile grew and grew.  That feeling of balancing between two wheels: for children, that’s magic!  The reality, though, is that it’s the result of taking a risk, falling, getting back up, and persevering by trying something a little different, building on what feels like it’s working, until suddenly…you get it and it feels incredible. 

Perseverance is one of the lessons we teach students through our bike riding safety classes, and it’s a lesson we’re learning ourselves as we develop our Safe Routes to School program.  Our goal is for more and more families to walk, bike, or roll to school every day.  There are so many benefits for students, their families, and our communities, but there are significant obstacles. From siting schools on roads without sidewalks and protected bike lanes, to designing streets for high speeds without safe crossings, to the disconnections between many schools and their surrounding neighborhoods - both physically and culturally.

Our approach is to combine teaching students bike riding and walking safety skills, promoting and encouraging families to try walking and biking to school, and organizing to call for building sidewalks and protected bike lanes between schools and neighborhoods.  We testing these strategies to learn what works, and we start at Eastway Elementary where we’ve had great support from PE Coach Nisha Watson and Principal Dr. Jackaline Teel. 

Starting with Eastway Elementary 

Thanks to a relationship that former Bike Durham board member Jen McDuffie already had through past Safe Routes to School activities with Eastway Elementary, we reached out to Coach Nisha Watson in September 2021 to implement programming and test new strategies in order to expose more students and families to walking and biking activities.

The first partnership activity with Eastway was the October 2021 National Walk to School Day. The whole school met on a sunny morning just before Halloween at the Save A Lot store across Alston Avenue to walk together to school: buses were rerouted to safely drop students in the parking lot and car drivers did the same.  Nearly 400 students and parents, many in costume, walked along the streets around the school campus, finishing with a big welcome from the Principal and PE teacher.  They gave powerful speeches about the importance and the benefits of walking and biking as transportation, both for personal and community health.

Building on the momentum from that event, we started our bike safety classes program in December 2021, following a model we had used at Merrick-Moore and Spring Valley elementary schools.  The program at Eastway was such a success that we decided to organize a last-minute “end-of-class celebration” on a Saturday morning on the school campus: parents, teachers, and students joined our 2-hour session of bike safety instructions, where we transformed the whole car parking lot into multiple biking courses: the students that participated to the Bike Safety Classes program were able to show their skills to Eastway students of all grades and their families.  Thanks to the generosity of Ari Birenbaum of Ninth Street Bakery, everyone also celebrated with delicious cookies. 

Eastway Elementary students celebrating at the end of the bicycling celebration on a Saturday in December 2021.

The event was intended to be one-of-a-kind: for the first time we decided to organize a bike-themed event outside of the school week.  It was so well received, though, that we have started incorporating such celebrations in our bike safety classes program: for the current school year, we are planning on having six of these events throughout the school year.

Now that we feel pretty confident with the bike riding safety classes, we have started a conversation with DPS transportation, PE Teacher Coach Watson and Eastway Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) to establish a regular series of walking and biking activities to school.  We want to engage families in establishing a walking bus activity that aims to help families that walk their children to school and to encourage more to do so.

In February we joined the Eastway PTA meeting where we presented the concept to the principal, the teachers, and some parents: hopefully, in the spring we will have the first Walk To School bus at Eastway Elementary!

The progress of activities at Eastway will not only be beneficial for that school community.  We will learn from our work there to spread successes to other school communities.  During the 2022-2023 school year we will be present in 12 DPS Elementary schools with Bike Safety Classes and what we did at Eastway will shape our programming to help us be successful in all of those schools.

As we gain experience with promoting regular walking and biking activities, we also look forward to taking another step toward our goals next year.  Thanks to our supporters, we’re adding an Advocacy Organizer who will work with parents, schools, and DPS to build on family interest in identifying infrastructure needs and advocating for their implementation with the City and NCDOT. 

Again, we plan to start at Eastway, learn what works, and persevere until we succeed at giving every family the opportunity to choose for their students to walk, bike, or roll to school.