Special Report: EPISD students rarely ride to school on $4.7M in free bikes

It’s been more than two years since TxDOT gave the El Paso Independent School District a $4.7 million grant that helped give free bikes and helmets to nearly 12,000 elementary-school students.

ABC-7 went searching recently to find out how those bikes are being used today.

TxDOT worked with city officials to assess the safest routes to and from campus, and schools taught kids the essentials of bike and pedestrian safety.

Most children who passed those classes received their bikes in the spring of 2012, but according to a survey taken shortly thereafter, the program didn’t significantly change the way kids commute.

“It provided safe routes to school,” said TxDOT spokeswoman Blanca Del Valle.

She said the Safe Routes program is more about teaching kids to commute safely than giving away millions of dollars in free bicycles.

“Yes, it’s worthwhile,” Del Valle said. “Can you put a price on a child’s safety?”

Maybe a better question would be, “Was this the most effective way to spend nearly $5 million on children’s safety?”

According to a fall 2011 parent survey, two percent said their child biked home from school. After the Safe Routes program, that number grew to four percent.

“Two percent to four percent is a 100 percent gain,” said EPISD Health, Wellness and Physical Education Director John Adams. “Is that where we’d want to be? Certainly not — we’d like our numbers to be much higher than that.”

The share of kids who walked home from school increased by nine percent as a result of the program. And 14 percent fewer parents said they gave their child a ride in a family vehicle.

But this day at Clardy Elementary, Guadalupe Sanchez is picking up her fourth-grade daughter, who received a free bike two years ago.

“Start respecting speed limits, and maybe that will give us the chance for our children to ride their bikes to school,” Sanchez said.

Of the 58 percent of parents who after the program said their kid still doesn’t walk or bike home from school, more than half of them cited speed along the route as a reason.

Alameda Avenue is just two blocks away from Zavala Elementary School, and Clardy Elementary is right on Delta Drive.

“I don’t let her ride her bike to school,” said parent Anna Corona. “I still think it’s dangerous because of the speeding that’s going down Delta.”

Corona is also picking up her fifth-grade daughter, Jada, who has never once ridden her free bike to school.

“Even though there’s cops around,” Anna said, “I think they need to take care of that also, of speeding.”

The number of speeding citations police gave near elementary schools rose from 44 in the spring of 2011, to 988 a year later.

Parent Veronica Baez said she bikes to school with her kids most days this time of year.

“As long as you teach your kids proper safety, nothing will happen to them,” Baez said. “Because along Delta, you do have the bike lanes.”

But this day at Clardy, the bike racks are completely empty. Zavala’s racks hold just one, and it doesn’t belong to fifth-grader Irvin Castillo. He’s biked the handful of blocks home from school only one time since he got his free ride in December. Irvin’s mom also picks him up from school, and he stores his bike across the street, because his tires are often flat.

“It’s like heavy pushing,” Castillo said. “The bike’s going slow, and then I just see my tires and … trying to go faster, but it didn’t.”

Surely not all of the nearly 12,000 bikes could be lying dormant in garages because of flat tires. So ABC-7 spoke with two different El Paso pawn shops. They said they typically don’t deal in children’s bikes, because they take up too much room and don’t turn over quickly.