Saratoga Shredders and Saratoga Springs City School District officials celebrated the beginning of a new mountain biking curriculum at the Maple Avenue Middle School 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 […]
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