IRVINE : Bicycle Helmet Rule for Students Foreseen

Ride a bike, wear a helmet.

Elementary school students in Irvine who bicycle to school are likely to find such a rule next fall under a policy being drafted for school board approval, said Dennis Gibbs, director of elementary school education for the Irvine Unified School District.

It would be the first time an Orange County school district mandated that student bicyclists wear helmets to school.

“What we hope happens is that children will wear them all the time,” Gibbs said. “Going to and from school is only a small percentage of the time kids are riding their bikes.”

The policy will affect students at each of the district’s 21 elementary schools. The school board recently asked district officials to write a helmet policy, and it will go before the board for adoption before the start of fall classes, Gibbs said.

Once the policy becomes official, elementary school principals will send letters home to parents of all 11,600 students notifying them of the requirement. The district is working on a program to loan helmets to students who cannot afford one, Gibbs said.

Once the Irvine board adopts the policy, it will be the strictest safety requirement among schools in Orange County, going beyond a helmet policy adopted in May by the Huntington Beach City School District Board of Trustees. That policy “strongly encourages” students to wear helmets.

The Huntington Beach district would have gone further, but officials were concerned whether schools can legally mandate what students do off campus, Supt. Duane Dishno said.

The Irvine district received an attorney’s opinion that requiring helmets is within the district’s authority to promote safety among students coming to and leaving school, Gibbs said.

The helmet requirement will be an extension of a experiment tried last school year at Los Naranjos and El Camino Real elementary schools. The experiment was an unqualified success, Los Naranjos Principal Bruce Baron said.

“There was 100% compliance. The parents loved it,” Baron said.

“What parents were expressing is they’ve all wanted their children to wear helmets for years, but the kids won’t do it because they don’t want to be made fun of and called names,” he said.

When student bicyclists have no choice about wearing a helmet, teasing is reduced because everyone is wearing one, he said.

The pressure from friends not to wear a bike helmet is so strong that most parents have trouble getting their children to wear one, said Marilyn Koeller, principal at Harbour View Elementary School in Huntington Beach. Last spring, parents brought up the subject of a mandatory helmet rule at an end-of-the-year principal’s meeting, she said.

“Parents want schools to push it so they don’t have to be the ones trying to get their children to wear a helmet,” Koeller said.

A successful helmet policy in Irvine might prompt other school districts to follow suit, she said.

The only known school district in Southern California to try a districtwide helmet requirement has had success, its superintendent said.

Parents in Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District have been the biggest supporters of the district’s mandatory helmet policy, which went into effect last fall, Supt. Michael Caston said. The district now has 100% of the students who ride bikes wearing a helmet to school, Caston said.

“We’re a couple of years into the program and have no regrets,” he said.