School bike vandalism

Is vandalism to bikes a problem at your nearby school?

My son and I attended a meeting for >our new along with about a dozen other families, and the coaches told the parents “stop driving your kids to school and make them bike. Building their training into their trip to school is the best kind of training they can get.”

Several teens immediately piped up, telling the adults that bikes in the bike parking area at the school are frequently vandalized. My son has had his bike tires and saddles slashed. This has been going on for a few years at least, and my complaints to school staff about this went absolutely nowhere.

The team business sponsor at this meeting expressed complete disbelief that the school adminstration would do nothing about this vandalism and dismissed the vandalism complaints as excuses.

The kids bring up a valid point, in my opinion: it’s really discouraging when you get out of class at the end of the day to find somebody has cut your tires or put something on your saddle. According to my son, it’s not a targeted thing, but somebody will go and damage several bikes all at once. It’s just malicious, stupid stuff. I live in small city with many affluent residents (a common nickname for my town is “Snob Valley”), and a lot of these teens have really nice rigs.

Have you heard of this at your local school? If so, was anything done to remove fear of vandalism as an impediment to biking to school?

P.S. The team needs sponsors. Let me know if you’re interested.

6 Comments

  1. Gosh, your business sponsor seems pretty unsympathetic. Not a good thing in someone working with kids. Can the school put a video camera near the bike racks? God knows they have a bunch of them all over the buildings these days.

  2. Why do I have the feeling that if this sort of thing was happening regularly to student’s cars in the parking lot, there would be hell to pay?

  3. well when i was in school (long time ago now 🙂 the bike parking was in a fenced in corral and they just locked the gate during the school day and there was always someone around when the gate was unlocked.

  4. I hate how dysfunctional school staff is in general.  It took locking my bike to the principal’s desk at one school to get the staff to acknowledge the problem.  And they still did nothing (besides suspend me for pointing out the problem).  It’s like public educators, by and large, are just punching the clock and drawing a paycheck.

  5. I don’t get how this isn’t being addressed by the school. There are vandals damaging private property and they don’t care? And let’s not forget, how do tires get slashed? With knives, there are students on campus with knives. Maybe THAT would get the administration to remove their collective head from their collective backsides?

    All that said, I don’t lock up my bike outside. If I can’t bring it in, I don’t bring it which is kind of a bummer but my week or month would be ruined if someone just randomly vandalized my bike.

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