Mom Fights For Right to Bike to School

How much control do school officials have over your kids? This mom is challenging the idea that they can not only make you come to school, but can tell you how you must get there:

A New York mother is fighting back against her school district after administrators and officials told her she and her son didn't have the right to bike to school together — and that his safety, even beyond school walls, was out of her hands.

Janette Kaddo Marino said their 3-mile rides to and from school in Saratoga Springs have been met with stiff opposition from officials and even a state trooper who claimed it was unsafe — and illegal — for her 12-year-old son Adam to travel on his own pair of wheels.

Undeterred, she and her seventh-grader have continued cruising to Maple Avenue Middle School this fall in defiance of a 15-year-old school regulation that effectively forces kids to take the bus or hitch a ride in a family car.

"They really don't have the right to tell me how to get my kids to school," Marino told FOXNews.com, emphasizing that she always accompanies her son and is "very safety-oriented."

"This just doesn't seem right to me that the school district would have that kind of authority over a parent," she said — noting that students have been asked not to walk to school. "We're not hurting anyone — we're just riding our bikes."

Even though administrators have tried to stop the Marinos from biking, school officials say they don't actually have the right to bar parents or students from walking or biking to school, and that the policy itself has been widely misunderstood.

"The existing policy is worded in such a way that it may lead one to believe that we're prohibiting biking to school," said Saratoga Springs superintendent Janice White.

The one-sentence clause in the school board handbook looks clear enough:

"The riding of bicycles by elementary pupils to and from school is prohibited."

We had been told by our local school officials that kids are under school authority from the time they leave home until they return, and should they do something wrong during the trip they can be punished by school authorities. In fact, we saw that in action one time when a group of kids threw something at our car as we were driving by. We knew who they were and reported it to the school. They got in trouble.

It's one thing to control bad behavior while going to and from school, but a completely different thing to tell people they must travel in a certain manner. The school in the story above is on shaky ground should they try and enforce their silly rules. Granted, they may be trying to prevent an accident, but people still need to be free to make their own choices whenever possible.