While Outlaw Motor Sports (OMS) offers a number of “fun” ATVs, motorcycles, snowmobiles, etc, they also know there’s a time to keep your nose to the grindstone. The shop is offering a “fun” incentive for perfect school attendance: A new mountain bicycle manufactured by Giant.

Every sixth grader enrolled in the county’s three school districts is eligible. The store’s co-owner, Lorien James, said that she was getting a vehicle serviced out of town last spring and noticed about 85 bikes in the showroom. An employee told her that the bikes were incentives to the area’s sixth graders to strive for perfect attendance.

It gave James an idea.

After contacting the county’s public schools in Joseph, Enterprise and Wallowa, she realized that no public school sixth-grader had perfect attendance. Only four Enterprise Elementary students from kindergarten through sixth grade had perfect attendance last year.

James and her husband, Dustin, initially thought about offering Giant bikes to all elementary students with perfect attendance but settled on sixth grade after talking with teachers about it.

“Sixth grade to seventh grade is a huge jump,” James said. “If you miss a day in seventh grade, you don’t miss out on one teacher, you’re missing out on seven teachers.”

“I asked our Giant Bicycle rep if they’d be interested in partnering with us to see if we could do it county-wide,” she said.

“I think this will be a great partnership,” James said. “I’m hoping it’s something that builds every year, so we can pull in different businesses to get involved in this.”

Four businesses have already offered to partner with OMS if perfect attendance student numbers should grow. James has also come up with the idea of a bike rodeo, which she has already discussed with Enterprise Police Chief, Joel Fish, and the county’s youth services department about obtaining bike helmets.

“I want to start a system where kids can register their bike’s serial number with the police department,” she said. “We had two kids this summer who had their bikes stolen.”

“There’s a lot of kids rolling around in these Giant bicycles,” James said. “These are high quality and they’ll last a long time.”