L.L. Bean’s trade-in promotion boosts Westbrook school program.

Trade in your used bicycle at L.L. Bean this weekend. You’ll not only receive a discount on the purchase of a new bike, but also will help out a bicycle repair program run by the Westbrook schools that benefits students and the community.

The arrangement forged between L.L. Bean and Westbrook’s Alternative Learning Bike Rehab Program involves a variety of bonuses.

First, according to Greg Tucker, L.L. Bean retail promotions planner, those who trade in their old bicycles during Bean’s Bike Weekend – which runs from Friday, May 21 to Sunday, May 23 – will get an additional 10 percent off the price of a new bicycle.

During Bike Weekend, Bean’s already is offering 20 percent off bicycles, as well as cycling gear and cycling apparel. For new bicycle purchases, the 10 percent discount for a trade-in bike would be added to that discount, Tucker said. The promotion is available at Bean’s Bike, Boat & Ski Store in Freeport and its 13 regional stores in other states, he said.

The bikes that customers trade in – from Maine and around the country – then will go to Westbrook’s bike repair program, part of Westbrook Adult & Alternative Learning, where alternative education students refurbish used bicycles. The students learn valuable mechanical skills, and the bicycles they repair are either sold to raise money for student scholarships, or donated to children and adults in the community who can’t afford to buy their own bikes.

Tucker said L.L. Bean selected the Westbrook program to donate the bikes to because “it sounded like a very interesting program and a way to keep kids in school with that hands-on experience.”

Shannon Belt, the Westbrook High School alternative education teacher who runs the bicycle repair program, said no one is sure how many bikes the promotion will generate, but that it could be 200 or more. Tucker said L.L. Bean will take used bikes in any condition.

Belt, students and other staff plan to go to Freeport this weekend in a loaned truck to pick up the bikes.

If there are more bikes than the Westbrook program can handle, Belt said the plan is to share them with a similar bicycle repair programs in Lewiston and Biddeford.

The nonprofit Community Bicycle Center in Biddeford is a place where youngsters can come after school to learn how to repair bikes for free.

In Westbrook, alternative education students learn how to repair bicycles as part of their school day. And when the program started about six years ago, it had anything but the potential plethora of bikes that now may be headed its way.

Belt said that the program initially relied on the 15 to 20 bicycles it gets each year from the police department. The bikes are stolen or abandoned property that police have recovered but which no owners have claimed.

But, Belt said, the number of bikes that students in the program have to work with increased three years ago when he came to the program. Belt also works in retail sales at Gorham Bike & Ski, and he said storeowner Jamie Wright has helped the program by donating used bikes his business receives. Wright also helped the program buy tools at cost, Belt said.

Since June of last year, Belt said, the program has received 120 bicycles. Each student who works on bikes gets to keep a rebuilt one and the rest get sold, donated or recycled for parts, he said. The program so far this year has raised $500 for scholarships for Westbrook students, Belt said.

This week, there were about 30 bikes in the half of the building that houses the bike repair program, located on the Westbrook schools campus on Stroudwater Street. Currently, Belt’s teacher’s desk is surrounded by bikes, but he said the hope is that the program can expand into the other half of the building soon, creating more room for bike storage.

One of the used bikes in the building this week was a small, blue, Specialized mountain bike that had seen better days. Its seat was worn and ripped, and its brakes and gears weren’t working.

But on Monday, the bike came into the experienced hands of two of the approximately 30 students in the bike repair program, James Hallstrom, 19, and Khris Cota, 18. They quickly stripped off its non-functioning components and began to repair or replace them. It was clear that soon the old bike would seem like new.

The program is not just about refurbishing bikes, however. Its purpose is to help students learn.

Belt said they master not only mechanical skills but also job skills.

“The kids get a sense of a procedure and a purpose and a schedule,” he said.

And he said fixing bicycles involves an understanding of math and physics as students learn about gear ratios and why a bike stays upright when its wheels are spinning.

Hallstrom said he’s not only put his math skills to work repairing bikes, but also has learned new vocabulary. For example, he said that Belt taught him the word “re-seating” as the two worked on bike cables.

The knowledge he has gained in the bike repair program has made him want to operate his own bike store when he finishes school, Hallstrom said.

Cota said he has learned people skills in the bike program, such as “how to work together and be a team.”

He said that unlike a traditional high school setting, where bullying can be common, “everybody (in the bike program) is like family and everybody gets along with each other, for the most part.”

Belt also hopes the program will create a new respect for bicycles in Westbrook, which he said has a reputation as a place where a lot of bikes get stolen, trashed and even thrown in the Presumpscot River. Belt said there’s a belief in Westbrook that if you drained the river, you’d find hundreds of bikes lying in the riverbed.

In fact, the refurbished bike that Hallstrom received from the bike program was stolen.

Belt believes that the more students get involved in the bike repair program, the more they’ll come to think differently about bikes.

“Maybe it will create a different attitude and people won’t rip them off,” Belt said.

James Hallstrom, 19, left, and Khris Cota, 18, students in the Westbrook schools’ Alternative Learning Bike Rehab Program, work together this week to rebuild a used bicycle. The program, in which students learn job skills, math and physics as they repair bikes to donate or sell in the community, will get additional used bikes this weekend from L.L. Bean. Staff photo by Tess Nacelewicz