Some middle schoolers in Saratoga Springs have a new addition to their physical education curriculum: mountain biking.
Non-profit Saratoga Shredders and the Saratoga Springs City School District have expanded a Bikes in Schools program to the Maple Avenue Middle School. It includes 30 free bikes, maintenance support, and professional training for physical education teachers.
The Bikes in Schools program is already implemented in six local elementary schools.
“We thought that by offering full scholarships to our shredders programs and offering free bikes to our kiddos in need for shredders programming that's external to schools that that would be enough that we'd reach, you know, a lot of kids that way,” said Laloë.
Saratoga Shredders Executive Director Anna Laloë says the expansion into the local middle school is the next step toward getting more kids on bikes.
“But there are so many more barriers than just the financial barriers to bikes, right? It's the transportation barriers of getting a bike from your home to a trail system, for example. In having them in the PE program, those barriers are all removed. The financial barriers are removed, the transportation barriers are removed; those kind of status symbol barriers are removed where you show up to a practice, and some kids have really fancy bikes and some kids don't,” Laloë added.
Just under a mile, the new mountain biking trail runs throughout the woods surrounding the middle school—the entire project, including construction, bikes and curriculum development cost upwards of $25,000.
This middle school project is a part of a larger initiative to create a full K-12 mountain biking program across the entire school district by next fall.
Saratoga Springs will be one of the first cities to have one, and organizers don’t have a blueprint to turn to.
Physical education teacher Mitch Snyder teaches physical education at Maple Ave. He’s been waiting a long time for a program like this.
“I've taught here for 27 years, and I've stood out on this field for years and thought about mountain bikes going around and going into the woods, and how could we do that? I even looked into it myself about 10 years ago, tried to see if I could, you know, get a grant, or what I could do, and it fell through, and then here it is, and I'm out here teaching it,” Snyder said.
He adds the novel curriculum comes with challenges.
“I would say the biggest challenge is that in a class of 30 kids, you've got four or five that might race mountain bikes, and then you've got four or five that have never been on a bike in their life. So, there's a wide range of skill level, and just trying to get them all on the bikes, active and having fun in different ways, has been a challenge,” said Schneider.
Additionally, the City of Saratoga Springs has allocated $400,000 to fund a bike park on Weibel Avenue.
Sophomore Talia Hodgson and freshman Anne-Sophie Laloë are excited to see their hobby get more local support.
“I’m really excited. I was on some of the Zooms for the building the bike park, and I'm just so excited biking is becoming a really big thing, and it's great,” said Hodgson.
“Yeah, I think it's gonna be a really good thing for the community to have an addition to the community, to have more bikes and people biking and stuff,” said Laloë.
Groundbreaking for the first phase of the park is set for the spring.
