Students at P.S. 76, the Bennington School, in the Bronx, celebrated the completion of a month long physical education unit on bike safety and riding by holding a schoolyard bike "rodeo" on Wednesday. The school and community experienced a tragic loss last June when fifth grader, Michael Needham Jr., was killed after being hit by a speeding car while riding his bicycle in front of the Allerton Library. Since then, P.S. 76 has taken action to equip all students with effective bike safety awareness and skills.
The school's administration and staff formed a Bike Safety Committee, bought bicycle helmets for every student, and partnered with Bike New York to get students pedaling safely. Bike New York provided its Bike Driver's Ed curriculum, its Bike Fleet, a Learn to Ride event for students and their parents, and a brand new bicycle which was raffled off to one lucky student. Did I mention that Bike New York did all of this for free?
Look out Dodgeball, there's a new sport in class. Check out Bike New York's website for information on how your school can get in on the action.
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">[intro music]</font> <br>
</p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Speaker:</i> [00:02]
So I’m here at PS 76 in the Bronx at their bike rodeo that they’re
having this morning. </font> <br></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Speaker:</i> [00:09]
Bike rodeo is a station by station event where students are using the
knowledge that they learned during the phys-ed classes to do activities
and games. </font> <br></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Hannah Borgeson:</i>
[00:17] And this is just a fun day for the students to reinforce what
they’ve been learning. But also the rodeo is just like biking,
it’s a lot of fun, but also meant to be taken seriously. </font> <br>
</p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Louise Sedotto:</i>
[00:27] We as a school had a very tragic event take place in June in
which we lost a fifth grader, Michael Needham, to a biking accident.
He was not wearing a helmet, and as a result we purchased helmets for
every student in our school, 1100 students, and Bike New York came and
worked with our gym teachers.</font> <br></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Rich Conroy:</i> [00:45]
We trained three of their PE teachers in a bike safety curriculum, a
bike skills curriculum called The Bike Drivers Ed, and we loaned them
12 little 20 inch bikes to use during those PE classes so the kids can
practice bike handling skills and things like scanning and signalling
and other important bike skills. </font> <br></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Tom Whitman:</i> [01:10]
I hadn’t ridden a bicycle on a regular basis in quite a few years,
so there was a lot of things that he taught us that I didn’t know
about and it was really very informative and hopefully we were passing
on some of that information to the kids. </font> <br></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Orshana Chung:</i>
[01:20] Remember how to put on your helmets or how to get in your bike
position and how to start your bike very slowly when start off.
And how to look both ways and look at stop signs when you’re there.
And we learned how… what body parts on the bike and what you’re
supposed to use to stop your bike or keep on going. </font> <br>
</p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Dan Russo:</i> [01:45]
Think about living in an urban environment and how bicycling is a part
of the transportation around the Bronx. If you think about childhood
obesity and the need for physical education and all those points to
and increase importance for bike safety. We realised that a lot
of skills that students need to ride a bike safely are not inherent
skills and we were assuming that they were, and what that they need
to be explicitly taught to wear a helmet, really race going on.
So the kids are travelling around the schoolyard with this kind of feeling
of enthusiasm and celebration, we’re culminating our bike safety.</font> <br>
</p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Rich Conroy:</i> [02:23]
We don’t charge the school a cent to borrow the bikes or to use the
curricular to have us work with their teachers, their PE teachers, and
train them in the curricular.</font> <br></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Orshana Chung:</i>
[02:34] I think riding bikes are good exercise for your legs and time
to have fun with your friends. </font> <br></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">[music]</font> <br></p>
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