Memorial High School Bike Club Wins Grant Award
In Spring 2025, the Memorial High School Bike Club won a $5000 grant from the City of Madison that aims to support youth-led climate initiatives! This bike club is the second bike club that we’ve supported in receiving this grant and we’re thrilled. This grant will help the club purchase tools and supplies, provide support for student run events, and add bike racks to the school; all things that encourage students to bike.
I’d like to take a moment and tell the story of our work at Memorial HS.
Last year, our grant funding expanded to allow us to start working with high school students: encouraging students to walk, bike, and bus for their transportation. As part of this effort, we’ve started bike clubs in three Madison high schools: East, Memorial, and La Follette. The Memorial HS Bike Club started this school year and has been gaining traction. The students come every Monday to the Metal and Glass Arts Classroom at lunch and we fix bikes and go on bike rides.
When we started the bike club, the students wanted to go on bike rides, but we didn’t have any bikes to ride yet. Grace Riedle-Joranlien, the teacher at Memorial that is sponsoring the club, found a dozen bikes in the gym storage that hadn’t been used in a while (10 years?). The bike club spent all winter fixing these bikes up one by one, and this spring we went on a bike ride to get ice cream to celebrate!
As we developed relationships with other staff in the schools, we collaborated with two of the Physical Education teachers to help run a bike unit in their three Fitness classes. This unit ran the whole month of May, we met every Wednesday and Friday and worked with 45 students. We started indoors, discussing bike safety best practices, and fitting all the students with bikes and helmets. Then we went outside, first practicing biking drills on the basketball courts and paths around schools. Some of the students (about one in ten) didn’t know how to ride yet, those students worked in a small group to practice balancing and pedaling; one by one they graduated to the more intermediate skills the rest of the class was practicing. As the students became more skilled riders, we led the classes on neighborhood rides to Owen Conservation Park and invited the Memorial HS Mountain Biking coach to introduce mountain biking skills. Some of the bikes that the PE classes used were the ones that the Bike Club fixed over the winter!
This unit has been so successful, we’re planning on running a similar bike unit with all of the Freshman PE classes next fall and we’re hoping to replicate this at other high schools.
As the Bike Club became more confident and skilled at fixing bikes, they hosted a bike repair event after school, where students and volunteer mechanics helped to fix student’s and staff member’s bikes. It was a great success!
On May 22nd, the three high school bike clubs joined together for a field trip to Trek Headquarters in Waterloo where they met the folks that engineer bikes, crash test helmets, custom fit bikes for professional athletes, and design the beautiful bike paint jobs. Look out for another blog post soon with more details about this trip.
We’re excited to continue to build the biking opportunities at Memorial High School!