I Can Actually Ride a Bike and Think At the Same Time

It's cold here in Michigan today. Not like winter, but too cold to ride your bike without gloves and hat. It's breezy on a bike. Unfortunately I didn't wear a hat today. Fortunately my sweatshirt has a hood. Also fortunately I'm not too worried about my appearance and so I was ok with tying up my hood for my bike ride home from the Goodwill store.

Ironically, to get to and from the Goodwill store I have to pass through two neighboring school districts, both of which serve families from higher tax brackets than most of the families in the district where I live and where my children attend. Both of these districts have very good reputations in our county, while our district is generally feared. When I say "feared" I mean both in terms of academic competence as well as physical safety. I just heard someone today worrying about her children being surrounded by a lot of kids doing bad things because there had been a shooting involving two high school kids from our district this week.

Back to my bike ride and my appearance. (And you thought this wasn't all going to come together!) As I was riding back home with my hood up and my little shopping bag hanging from my handle bars, a car of four high school boys drove past me. Before I could even see them they shouted at me, "Grow up already!"

I'm pretty sure that they had no idea that I'm nearly forty years old. Not to brag, but from the back, which was all they could see when they yelled, I could have been just about any age. Regardless, it was rude. Besides, they scared the crap out of me and what if I had veered into them because I was so startled.

I still had about two miles or so back to my house, plenty of time to ponder, and here's what I came up with. It doesn't really matter where you send your kids to school, as far as keeping them safe goes.

I started wondering what the ratio of gun accidents to car accidents involving high school kids in our county is. Maybe gun deaths to car accident deaths would be a closer comparison. My suspicion is that more kids are killed or permanently injured in car accidents. I also think that kids in more affluent districts have more access to cars than the other kids have access to guns.

I started thinking about my cousins who grew up in rural communities. I don't think their parents worried a lot about gun violence, but I know they worried about car accidents. They have lost many kids in their small communities to car accidents.

I think the way you keep your kids safe is to teach them how to keep themselves safe and then after that you just pray like crazy. Sometimes that will be enough, and sometimes it won't.

I guess I've sort of slipped into a ramble here, so maybe I should be more explicit with my point. I think more people should give our "scary" district a chance. Maybe if more people had a stake in how well we do, the district would improve in many ways. It's not fair to be more afraid of guns than cars. It's just easier.