Tykes on Bikes: Southern Utah Bicycles Alliance and Healthy Dixie Council Partner to Get Youngest Riders Rolling

By Marianne Hamilton

Arthur LeBaron calls the experience “magical.” Each time the Southern Utah Bicycle Alliance (SUBA) board member and Hurricane City engineer delivers a supply of Strider® Bikes to a local kindergarten class, he sees expressions of unbridled ecstasy on the students’ and teachers’ faces.

The magic began in April, 2023, when SUBA first partnered with the Healthy Dixie Council to make bicycle riding accessible for southern Utah’s youngest riders. To date, SUBA and Healthy Dixie have distributed more than sixty balance bikes to several kindergarten classes in Washington and Iron Counties. When the fall term begins, more bikes will roll into other local schools.

For the uninitiated, Strider (among its many products) makes small push bikes that have no pedals. Instead, beginning riders can “scoot” forward on two wheels at their own speed. As they gain confidence and move faster, kids learn to pull their feet up onto pegs in the middle of the bikes, thereby developing critical balance skills. Along with the physical aspects of riding, young riders also acquire an allimportant sense of self.

“We’ve found that kids who know how to ride a bike have a certain level of autonomy and freedom that gives them self-confidence,” said Ryan Gurr, owner of Red Rock Bicycles, which supplies the Strider bikes. Gurr, a former SUBA president, also delivers bikes to kindergarteners and says he has witnessed the

benefits of the program firsthand. “When kids feel like they can just jump on a bike and ride to a friend’s house, to school, to the pool, or elsewhere, they start to feel like they can take on challenges by themselves,” he noted.

“Being on a bike also helps with kids’ mental health,” Gurr added. “For the kindergarten kids, the bikes allow them to focus on something, whether that’s riding around a rock, up onto a curb, or around cones. It helps them develop brain skills that a lot of adults take for granted.”

SUBA and Healthy Dixie were inspired to launch their program after watching the success of Valley Academy’s mountain bike elective course, which has been available to fourth- through eighth-graders for the past year. Students who take the course spend two weeks learning to ride mountain bikes and then put in two-week stints building mountain bike trails on the Academy’s surrounding property. Gurr and LeBaron also laud Outride, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of youths through cycling. Outride oversees Riding for Focus, which empowers middle school students with ADD and ADHD to improve their cognitive, physical, and socioemotional well-being via access to bikes.

“We’ve created our program to make it easier to get into our schools and made it 100 percent customizable,” said Gurr. “Each school can incorporate the features that work best for their students.”

LeBaron, father of seven and a thirteen-time IRONMAN® St. George competitor, noted that giving little ones access to two wheels early on will reap significant benefits as they mature. “SUBA and Healthy Dixie have data showing that only one in four kids at the kindergarten level knows how to ride a bike. So automatically, biking won’t be for them. We want to remove that barrier by putting balance bikes into schools that kids can use at recess. Then, making the transition to pedal bikes will be seamless, and hopefully, we can instill a lifelong love of riding bikes in the kids.

“The coolest thing,” LeBaron continued, “is when the teachers text us a video two weeks after the kids get the bikes, and they’re zooming around, having a blast. The kids love it, and we feel like the program will have a long-term ripple effect in how they feel about themselves.”

Bike purchases and distribution are being made possible through a unique combination of grants and donations. According to LeBaron, the first fundraising pitch sent out by SUBA and Healthy Dixie Council yielded $25,000 from community members. “We have a grant program that allows the schools to raise half the funds for the wholesale cost of the bikes, then we contribute the other half,” LeBaron explained. “This enables the schools to get into the program for a very low cost.”

Given the wholesale price of $140 per bike, that cost works out to just $67 to be covered for each bike by a school. LeBaron notes that a generous benefactor (who chooses to remain anonymous) has pledged to cover 100 percent of the cost of putting bikes in Title I schools; this has enabled bike purchases for a school in Iron County.

At Valley Academy in Hurricane, sixty kindergarteners learned important lessons about taking turns and sharing the twenty bikes the school received. Hurricane’s Three Falls Elementary School now has five bikes, Hurricane Elementary has ten, and in Cedar City, Gurr delivered twenty to Three Peaks Elementary.

La Verkin Elementary School received ten bikes, prompting Principal Gabby Young to tout their physical and mental benefits. “Obviously, the first thing is that the bikes promote physical activity,” Young said during an interview for a Community Education Channel segment about the bike program. “But it’s also about developing fine and large motor skills. Our kids are learning how to balance, how to have multiple things going on at once, how to make decisions quickly, and how to watch out for others—things that are all developmental, especially for five- and six-year-olds.”

While Gurr and LeBaron prefer to experience the excitement of delivering the bikes to students in person during the school year, they’re more than willing to make drop-offs throughout the summer months. And while their coffers will need to be replenished after they’ve supplied roughly 200 bikes, both anticipate that Utahns will step up to the challenge.

“At this point, we don’t see us running out of the funds we need,” LeBaron predicted. “We really feel like the community will continue to sponsor this program. It’s rung too much of a chord in too many people’s hearts to allow it to die.”

Tax-deductible donations to the Southern Utah Bicycle Alliance’s balance bike program can be made at https:// southernutahbicyclealliance.org/supportsuba/donate/. If your school is interested in receiving bikes, email arthur@cityofhurricane.com.

About the Author

Marianne L. Hamilton is a veteran journalist and marketing writer whose work appears in regional and national publications.

When not race walking, hiking, or teaching water aerobics, she is the past Board Chair of Art Around the Corner and the Special Events Manager for DOCUTAH. She and her husband, Doug, are also co-administrators of the St. George Wine Club and race directors for the Huntsman World Senior Games and National Senior Games. Marianne was crowned Ms. Senior Universe 2021-2022 and is the Senior Pageants Group’s Senior Games Ambassador. She is a proud breast cancer survivor.