Poe students learn bike safety

Now that school’s out for the summer, some local kids will be safer riding bikes around their neighborhoods.

All sixth-graders at Poe Middle School in Annandale learned how to ride a bicycle for the first time, or if they are more advanced riders, learned about bike safety, as part of their physical education class.

Poe is one of 33 Fairfax County Public Schools that teach bike safety, reports a feature story by the FCPS Office of Communication and Community Relations.

At Poe, PE teacher Tim Spicer (known as TSpice) along with colleague and younger brother Mike Spicer (MSpice) started out by teaching students how to choose and wear the proper helmet.

The duo taught appropriately 15 students how to ride bikes for the first time.

“Inclusion is a big part of why we do this,” Mark Spicer. “A lot of these kids have friends riding bikes. It is a very normal thing for kids this age to go out and ride around, go to the park, hang out with their friends. It is not a fun feeling when one kid can’t go and ride with them.”

For more experienced bike riders, the Spicers focused on topics like hand signals for turns, safety rules, and the meanings of road signs.

The PE teachers set up a complicated road course outdoors, complete with stop signs, yield signs, bumpy objects to ride over, and cones to zigzag around.

The bikes are provided by FCPS and are funded by a Safe Routes to School grant. Sally Smallwood, the Safe Routes to School program coordinator, developed bike safety lessons for the program based on safety training developed by the League of American Bicyclists.

Smallwood estimates 10 to 20 percent of FCPS students in grades 3 to 8 do not know how to ride a bike.

Jeremiah Halcomb-Clayborne, 12, is one of the Poe students who learned to ride a bike in his PE class. “At first I was scared that I would hurt myself going down hills, with the balancing,” Jeremiah says. “But then I learned how to balance. All you have to do is keep still, keep the force in the middle of your body. If you put the force on one side, you will tip that way.”

Student Angelica Williams already knew how to ride a bike but says she picked up some pointers from the program, such as the importance of slowing down before making a turn.

“In life, if you don’t have a car and you need to do something, with a bike you can go places,” Angelica says. “It is important to know how to use it while being careful,”