Let’s Continue Bikers’ Education In Local Schools

Bicycles are the most useful, enjoyable, healthful and dangerous instruments parents can give their children.

Skillful riders can find a lifetime of destinations on a bike, whether it’s to the corner store, the top of Mount Spokane or around the world.

That’s assuming the kids live long enough to learn the rules of the road.

Gang violence gets a community’s attention. The daily head-bashing and bone-breaking caused by bicycle accidents generally goes unnoticed, except in emergency rooms.

Next to football, basketball and soccer, bicycling is the most likely recreation to put a kid the hospital.

After raising a son and teaching elementary school for 25 years, the broken arms and twisted bike frames haven’t gone unnoticed by Eileen Hyatt.

Here’s a Spokane teacher whose wheels are always turning.

A bicycle commuter and long-distance bike tourist, Hyatt has pedaled her way safely through the backroads of Canada, Poland, Germany, England, France and New Zealand.

For the past three years, she’s also been pedaling her knowledge in the streets of Spokane.

“In 1992, I ran out of excuses after finding a bicycle safety curriculum from the Bicycle Federation of America,” Hyatt said. “This was something that just had to be done in Spokane. Somebody had to do it.”

Leaving her Farwell third-graders to a student teacher and the principal for about an hour a day, Hyatt tested and modified the curriculum while working with students grades four through six.

She scrounged bicycles from the sheds at Camp Reed and sweet-talked North Division Bicycle Shop into donating new tires, tubes and whatever else was necessary to get the bikes running.

Other organizations were hit up for donations to buy helmets. She made simulated traffic signs out of sticks and cardboard.

Then she recruited up to 12 parents to help with each class in the seven-session course she developed as Spokane’s first serious bicycle safety program.

Kids don helmets, check their bikes for safety and practice biking basics, including straight-line riding.

“Whether you’re a kid or an adult, it takes practice to learn how to scan for traffic over your left shoulder without veering left into the way of a vehicle,” she said.

Hyatt’s program is based on research.

“A California study verified that riding on sidewalks or riding against traffic is more dangerous for a cyclist than riding with the flow of traffic,” she said.

The course teaches the importance of making eye contact with a driver at an intersection. Without eye contact, the driver subconsciously ignores the presence of the bicyclist.

“Basically, fourth grade is the earliest you can be effective with teaching bicycle safety,” Hyatt said. “Before that, you shouldn’t let kids into traffic unless they’re closely supervised. They don’t have the capacity to follow rules of the road. They have to learn to be predictable.” Once she had proved the course could be effective, she faced the daunting task of spreading it to other schools.

She persevered. Emergency Medical Services donated 30 helmets. The Police Guild and firefighters’ union bought 30 bicycles because kids can’t be required to bring a bike to school.

“Besides, the bikes kids own often are in disrepair,” Hyatt said. “A teacher can’t afford to spend class time fixing bikes.”

Word of mouth brought the program to 10 schools in 1993.

Hyatt would train the teachers, who in turn would train the parent helpers to put on the seven-week course.

When the 1995 Washington Legislature convened, Rep. Jean Silver, R-Spokane, cited Hyatt’s bicycle safety program as the type of fluff that needs to be stripped from public education.

The public doesn’t necessarily agree.

“We have huge support from parents,” Hyatt said. The public, too.

Local Rotary clubs recently made major contributions, and Qual-Med Health Plan gave $4,000 for another set of bikes.

“It’s not hard to figure out why,” Hyatt said. “The average cost of treating a head injury is almost $12,000. If Qual-Med encourages one kid to avoid injury by wearing a helmet and riding safely, they’ve tripled their investment.”

After more than two years of persistence, Hyatt has personally spearheaded the cause to spare angry taxpayers the expense of teaching kids to live with deadly traffic.

The program now has a legion of trained teachers and 90 bikes available to Spokane-area schools. Since June, 2,400 kids have cruised through the course.

“We now have the capability of doing 21 schools a year,” she said. “It doesn’t cost a school much more than the price of poster board.”

So where’s the fluff?

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Rich Landers The Spokesman-Review