The Newport Mesa Unified School District (NMUSD) e-bike ban was sold as a safety policy. A week into the school year, the evidence says otherwise at Ensign Intermediate School in Newport Beach: bike racks sitting virtually empty, kids parking on public streets next to moving traffic, and drop-off and pick-up lines now backed up for 30 minutes. One Ensign parent, interviewed by CBS News in the first week of school, put it plainly: now she’s late to work every day because there’s no other way to get her son to school, and the traffic backs up the whole street.
The school board didn’t make anyone safer. Instead, trustees relocated the risk somewhere they have no authority to manage.
We are parents of Ensign middle school students. Policy 5142.04, which bans e-bikes on K-8 NMUSD campuses, is a policy that attempts to regulate what happens before kids arrive on campus and after they leave – by controlling whether they can use a resource the district has always provided: a bike rack.
NMUSD campuses have long operated under a simple rule: walk your bike on campus, park it in the rack. That rule applied equally to traditional bikes and e-bikes. It regulated conduct on school property, which is squarely the board’s job.
Policy 5142.04, adopted at the April 2026 school board meeting, does not add a safety rule to that framework. It removes an entire category of students – those who ride e-bikes – from campus access to a bike rack. The policy penalizes kids, not for how they behave on campus, but for what they ride on a public street to get there.
This is a slippery slope for the NMUSD board, and all NMUSD parents and community members, no matter their stance on e-bikes, should be concerned.
How a bike or e-bike is ridden on a public street is governed by the California Vehicle Code and enforced by city police, not a school district. A school board can set rules for its own campus. It cannot use control of a campus resource as leverage to shape behavior once a student is off district property. But yet, that’s exactly what Policy 5142.04 does: it bans e-bike parking, which is the only lever the district has, and uses that lever to push a category of transportation entirely off campus and into the public domain, where the district has no authority and, it turns out, no plan. Quite simply, the board has overreached and is now acting outside its jurisdiction.
Ironically, the policy undermines what little jurisdiction the board had over e-bike riders. Students who don’t park on campus are no longer required by the district to take important safety courses. In overreaching, they lost an important opportunity to engage with and educate our community’s youngest and most vulnerable riders.
This is an ideological policy, pushed through by six of the seven NMUSD trustees. Board members have said as much themselves. In public meetings, trustees described the policy in terms of relieving parents who feel pressured to buy their kid an e-bike – parents who are now, in their words, relieved they don’t have to. That is not a safety rationale. That is the board substituting its judgment for a parenting decision, and using a campus resource to enforce it. There was a behavior the board didn’t like, happening on streets the board doesn’t control, and the board shut down access to a resource it does control.
If a school board can withhold access to a campus bike rack to shape what students do on public streets, the boundary between campus authority and parental authority has effectively disappeared. The next transportation or parental choice the board dislikes is one Policy Committee meeting away from the same treatment.
Ensign has nearly 900 students across two grades, drawn from across Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, some from four miles out. For many of them, an e-bike is the only realistic way to get to school. The board didn’t make that trip any safer.
We are calling on the NMUSD trustees to rescind Policy 5142.04 and restore campus bike rack access for students riding e-bikes to school. If the board wants to improve safety, it can do what Trustee Ashley Anderson has been calling for: work with the cities of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa on real bike infrastructure and Safe Routes to School planning near Ensign, where none currently exists. That’s within the board’s mandate. Deciding how a family gets a kid to school is not.
Alex Williamson and Sarah Middleton are Costa Mesa residents and parents of Ensign Intermediate students.
