The Cascade Bicycle Club recently awarded Auburn’s Parks, Arts and Recreation Department a $212,033 grant to support a new middle school biking program.

And on Monday evening, the Auburn City Council gave Mayor Nancy Backus the unanimous go-ahead to strike an agreement between the city and club to accept the grant funds and spend them on two new city bicycle programs.

“I’m really excited to see Cascade Bicycle Club making more of a presence in South King County. I think we’ve got some of the best bike trails in the region, our Interurban Trail, and of course our new Cedar Lanes Bike Park,” said Councilmember Kate Baldwin.

Kevin Witte, who oversees Auburn’s recreational programs, said that as of July 16, there was no finalized agreement with the schools, so the city can’t name which of them — Olympic, Cascade, Mt. Baker, or Rainier — will offer the program. The funds are provided by WSDOT, and Cascade is the grant authority for the program.

“The whole point of the funds from WSDOT is to provide education for alternative modes of transportation, especially with children and underserved communities to reduce transportation as a barrier for work, for life, those type of things, ” Witte said.

The city’s parks and recreation department will work with local bike advocates, teachers, and local communities to teach students in systemically-underserved communities about bike and pedestrian safety and leadership skills that will improve the health and well being of kids — and create a cleaner, greener, more equitable state.

Cascade Bicycle Club is a well-established bicycling group in the greater Seattle region that focuses on secondary students, including middle school and high school-aged students, to teach bicycling as transportation.

“It is working with WSDOT to develop a curriculum and a guide that’s going to help us develop the program that we kind of laid the framework for. The idea is to teach kids at that middle-schoolish age about how to safely ride a bike to and from school and around the community, and to go and see friends and live their lives,” Witte said.

The program requires instructors to teach maintenance and operatios of a bicycle, proper helmet fitting, traffic education, riding on roads with and without bicycle lanes, riding on sidewalks and off sidewalks, around schools, and through controlled intersections and uncontrolled intersections.

The program requires that when it ends, as long as a teen or tween completes the program, they will be given a bicycle through the grant, via the earn-a-bike component.

“This is a new program for Cascade and WSDOT, so some of those details are still being worked out,” Witte said. “We’re probably going to have a better idea what the program’s going to look like at the end of August. We’re going to have a process for students and families to apply because the focus is on quality. We would rather have a smaller number of kids get a good education than a ton of kids get a little bit, because we really want this to be a practical and lifelong skill.”

Cascade works with the Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT) to identify qualified recipients of grant funding through the School-Based Bicycle Safety Education Program, and to administer those grants.

The program is funded for one year, but at the end of the year, as long as the state doesn’t cut the funding or WSDOT doesn’t completely change its goal for the funds, the city would be able to apply to renew for another year and potentially keep the program going for many years to come.

This new program, which starts this fall, will not be the only one the city is running. It has learn-to-ride programs called Pedal Power, and it is working with the younger kids and special needs kids with its Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program at several of the elementary schools. And now with the pump track and skills track at Cedar Lanes Park up and going strong, it is offering a summer camp next week at the park in southeast Auburn.