Xavier Glassley-Sams had never ridden a bike before he entered this year’s bicycle safety training class at Hawthorne School, put on by the Santiam Spokes cycling club.
Xavier and his fellow fifth-graders started the six-day class the first week of May, in which club members taught them bicycle skills, safety and rules of the road. The bicycle safety program is an extension of Safe Routes to School.
Club member Ken Bronson, who has taught the class for six years, including the three since COVID that the class has been held, noticed that Xavier needed a little extra help.
He decided to provide the 11-year-old with some incentive to develop some cycling skills in the week’s time they had available.
“He’s learning the rules of the road, but he never rode a bike, and he doesn’t have a bike,” Bronson said. “So when we had to learn how to ride a bike, I gave him a challenge that if he could learn to ride that bike by the end of the session, that I would make sure that he had a bike before the end of the school year.
“So on the last day, he pulled it off, and so I had to pay up.”
On May 9, after school was out, Bronson showed up at Hawthorne with a brand new bike, complete with a lock (donated by a Salem bicycle shop), a helmet donated by the Sweet Home Police Department, and some tools so Xavier and his mom, Danni Glassley-Sams, could keep it tuned up.
They met in the school parking lot, where Xavier got to try out his new bike. It was different than the bike he’d learned to ride in the class, so it took him a few spins before he was able to ride the new bike, a hybrid mountain-cruiser-style.
Danni said that on the last day of the bicycle safety course, Xavier raced into her rentals management office after he got home from school and announced that he needed to go back to Hawthorne.
“I said, ‘What’s going on?’
“He said, ‘I need to go back to learn how to ride a bike.’”
Bronson said on the final day of the class he took some of the more advanced students on an extended ride around Sweet Home while one of his fellow club members worked with Xavier.
“When I came back from the two-hour ride with the group, he was riding around the back of the school,” Bronson said.
He said that when they started, Xavier had trouble with balance and had some other challenges, “but I could see he had potential.”
“I remember when I was that age, how important a bike was,” Bronson said. “I had freedom. He got it.”
Xavier said he was confident from the start that he could learn to ride the bike, but “it was hard to glide, to pedal.”
“But I looked forward and I thought I could do it,” he said.