BENTONVILLE — The warehouse at AMP Sign and Banner off the Wishing Springs Trail is packed this week. Reams of paper have been pushed aside to make way for boxes and boxes of bikes. Trek bikes to be exact. Five hundred forty of them.
The Bentonville School District will be the first in the state - and maybe the first in the nation - to provide 30 high-quality bicycles in each of its schools, according to Alan Ley with Bike Bentonville.
A community of support has coalesced to make the project happen, from raising more than $100,000 to assembling the hundreds of bikes. The warehouse has been full every day for a week with volunteers breaking open boxes, attaching cranks to frames, and checking brake cables.
Bentonville’s Phat Tire Bike Shop lent mechanics to the project for up to eight hours a day. Other volunteers are willing parents, community-oriented cyclists and physical education teachers excited about the new possibilities.
More than half of the bikes had been assembled Thursday and the remaining bikes will be finished within the next two weeks, said Mary Ley, communications director for the school district. When complete, the district will have at least 30 Trek MT 200 mountain bikes in each school.
The district started a bicycle mechanic program at the high school this year. Students in the program will be responsible for maintenance and upkeep on the bikes.
Bill Hesse of Bella Vista, a longtime cyclist, has worked with the school district to train students in bike safety at Cooper Elementary School.
“My first bicycle was such a sense of freedom for me,” Hesse said. “My mom was one of the few in the neighborhood that didn’t drive. If I wanted to go somewhere, I had to ride my bike. You just don’t see kids doing that anymore.”
The seven-speed bicycles are available with 20-, 24- and 26-inch wheels for varying age groups.
Most of the schools in the district are near the city’s many mountain bike trails. Lincoln Junior High School, Thomas Jefferson Elementary School and Sugar Creek Elementary School are all near a new trail that connects with Park Springs Park. Washington Junior High School is next to the Memorial Park trails, and the high school backs up to the Razorback Regional Greenway. Mary Ley said teachers from schools not on a trail have worked out a way to get students safely to trails to ride.
A minimum of three instructional hours on the trail system will be incorporated into the physical-education curriculum for third- to eighth-grade students each quarter.
School Board member Travis Riggs said the donation is a “pretty major deal” for the district.
“It’s a great display of the need for our kids to be more active and to promote safe travel to schools,” Riggs said.
The Walton Family Foundation, Coca-Cola, the Wal-Mart Visitors Center and the Bentonville Public Schools Foundation and Trek all contributed more than $130,000 toward the purchase of the bicycles. Bell donated 540 bike helmets, and Phat Tire and AMP Sign and Banner offered in-kind services.
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 11/17/2012