Quail Run Elementary students participate in a BLAST pilot program during the 2015-2016 school year.

Next school year, the Lawrence school district will have an asset not common to most: a fleet of bicycles. The bikes will roll into action in September, as elementary students in the district begin a new bicycle education program.

“Learning to ride a bike is an important milestone for kids, and we feel that all students should have that opportunity, but also be able to do it safely,” Quail Run Elementary PE teacher Rodney Hess told the school board this week. “The (Bicycle Lesson and Safety Training) program helps with that.”

Quail Run was one of four elementary schools that piloted the BLAST program last school year, and PE teachers from all four schools spoke at the board’s most recent meeting in favor of continuing the program.

At the end of the presentation, board members voted unanimously to accept a grant from the Lawrence-Douglas County Health Department to purchase a fleet of bikes to launch the program districtwide next school year. Maintenance costs for the bikes will come from the district’s capital outlay budget.

Making bicycles available to all students is a key component of the program, said Michael Showalter, health promotion specialist with the health department.

“They are actually teaching some kids how to ride bikes when they go out to these programs, because a lot of students don’t have access to bicycles outside of the school,” Showalter said.

The approximately $15,000 grant from the health department will go toward the purchase of a fleet of 30 bicycles that will travel from school to school. In addition to the bikes themselves, the funds will cover the purchase of a transport trailer, helmets, maintenance tools and neon cones to create obstacle courses, Showalter said.

The program will be part of the school district’s PE curriculum, and will include helmet and traffic safety instruction, as well as three sessions of on-bike training, said Denise Johnson, the district’s curriculum coordinator of health and wellness. For now, the plan is for all fourth- and fifth-graders in the district to be provided with bike education next year.

The Lawrence BLAST program is a component of the communitywide “Be Active Safe Routes” initiative, which works to make routes to school more accessible by foot and bicycle. A state grant provided a large part of the funding for the month-long pilot of the BLAST program this past school year, in which about 300 students at four elementary schools participated.

“When it was finished, our PE teachers loved it,” Showalter said. “All of them got together to talk about how they thought they could integrate it into the curriculum that they’ve already developed. They’d already talked about pedestrian and bicycle safety, and it just seemed like a really good fit.”

For the pilot, the district borrowed bicycles from the coordinators of the BLAST program, BikeWalkKC. In the future, the district and its program partners would like to purchase additional bicycle fleets in order to expand BLAST to more grade levels.

“For right now we’re going to see how many schools we can reasonably provide BLAST education to with the bike fleet in both spring and fall of this coming year,” Showalter said. “And hopefully we see some improvement in the number of bicycles we have in the next couple of years.”