A handful of Huband Elementary students are now without wheels after heartless thieves made off with bicycles left on school property over the weekend.
“Over the weekend, seven students had their bikes stolen from the school property,” said Huband principal Charles Schilling. “They were all chained to the bike racks. [The thieves] came in, cut the chains off all of them, and took them.”
Schilling said the theft would have happened sometime between Thursday afternoon and Monday morning.
“The students were from the active learning class, a Grade 5-6 class,” said Schilling. “Part of the active learning program is that they do bike safety and bike experiences. So now seven of the kids don’t have their bikes.”
Schilling said that while most kids take their bikes home with them for the weekend, with Friday being a professional development day there was no school, and some bikes were left behind, Thursday afternoon.
“In most cases, [bikes] are brought inside the school over the weekend, if kids leave them there,” said Schilling. “Because it was a long weekend and there was no school on Friday, there was an oversight and on Thursday there were some bikes left outside - they did not get brought in.
“In years past, bikes have been stored in the school, and we have been doing that, but because of the long weekend, there was an oversight.”
Schilling is hopeful someone might have seen something suspicious at the bike racks over the weekend.
“I’m just trying to get the word out that this happened… hopefully someone has seen something, or knows something. Maybe there’s a chance that by spreading the word more, we could find these bikes.”
Anyone with information is asked to call the Comox Valley RCMP at 250-338-1321 and cite file number 2017-15617.