By Zoey Thomas
Wisconsin State Journal
(reprinted from June 12, 2026 edition)
The students biking through the 3-acre forest beside Lake View Elementary School came from 18 countries, from Vietnam to Honduras. Wearing matching cherry-red helmets, the young riders at the multicultural community school looked equally confident as they showed off the trail-riding skills they’d spent a year perfecting.
Supervising a few feet away, James Kersten, the school’s gym teacher of 11 years, stepped in occasionally to adjust a gear or offer encouragement.
“Everybody deserves a chance to learn how to ride a bike,” he said, a long whistle dangling over his Lake View Lizards T-shirt. “It just opens up the world.”
For the past five years, Kersten has led an effort to dig bike trails in the woods adjacent to the school. His labor came to fruition last week, when he stood alongside about 20 of his students to cut the ribbon on the finished landscape of crisscrossing, swooping paths.
Though Kersten oversaw the project from start to finish, he had help from groups across the Madison community. Bike manufacturer Trek Bikes donated 32 bikes to the school, and Bike Parks for Kids, a local nonprofit, contributed a storage shed. All said they shared a common goal: to make cycling accessible to children whose access to the outdoors is often limited.
About three in four students at Lake View qualify as economically disadvantaged, according to the school’s 2024-25 report card. That’s the third-highest percentage among the Madison School District’s 32 elementary schools.
The school also serves more students of color and English language learners than any other district school across all grade levels. About 91% of students at Lake View are nonwhite, and nearly half are English learners.
Research has long found people of color, families with children and low-income communities are more likely to live in neighborhoods that lack parks or other green space. These communities often have less access to sidewalks, paths or trails where they can ride a bike.
In Madison, neighborhood block groups without parks have a median household income between about $17,500 to $40,000 lower than those with at least one park, according to a Wisconsin State Journal analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data compared with a list of parks taken from the city’s website.
Kersten estimated about 60% of his students had never ridden a bike before Lake View received the bike fleet donation in fall 2025.
When Kersten first came to Lake View, he was surprised by his students’ aversion to the outdoors, he said.
Kersten moved to Madison in 2013 from East Troy, a 5,000-person village an hour east of Madison. He remembers spending much of his childhood outside, building forts and riding his bike from one side of town to another. The students he met at Lake View didn’t share those experiences.
“They were like, ‘I’m not allowed to go into the forest, I’m not allowed to go off the grass, the forest is dangerous, the animals are going to eat me,’ all of these things,” he said. “That was a cultural shock for me.”
He’s since made it a priority to instill a love of nature-based play, he said.
It’s a mission shared by others at a school long touted for its environmental education efforts. With the help of local nonprofit Groundswell Conservancy, the school purchased a little over half an acre, as well as an easement on the backyards of houses along the school forest, in 2017. The entire Lake View property spans just over eight acres, including the forest, according to district spokesperson Ian Folger.
Participating in physical activity, particularly while surrounded by “elements of nature,” can improve classroom focus and concentration for young students, said Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, a UW professor of pediatrics and human development and family studies. Yet environmental and economic disparities can prove significant barriers to many, he said.
Poor neighborhoods may be less likely to have sidewalks or safe riding spaces, and parents sometimes hesitate to let their children play outside if they’re concerned about the risk of violence, Navsaria said. Bikes can also be expensive and hard to replace if stolen.
“Those disparities play out in many ways,” he said. “It’s not as simple as saying, ‘Oh, you just need to get your kid a bike and let them and tell them to ride.’ There’s a lot of different challenges around there.”
Many of Lake View’s students come from the Oak Park Terrace mobile home park or Northport Apartments, a low-income housing community, said Kersten. Nature exploration in those areas, he said, is limited.
Building the trails began as the effort of a small crew — made up of just Kersten, the school’s art teacher, and a couple of shovels and rakes. It quickly grew over the past year as more local groups stepped in to help.
Members of Blackhawk Ski Club, a Middleton-based nonprofit outdoors group, were among the volunteers.
Pat Remington, Blackhawk’s mountain bike program director, helped shovel, rake and pick at the earth to carve out the trails. During one of the days, he even scratched and bent his glasses — but seeing the children “zipping around” on the finished paths made it worth it, he said.
“This is why we do it,” he said. “A kid was riding by me today, really doing well, and I said, ‘You look like a pro,’ and he said, ‘Yep.’ That’s all he needed to say — that’s the reason.”
Hermione Sandoval, a Lake View fifth grader, said she and her fellow students “really appreciate” the bike donations. The effort will help children like her 6-year-old niece, she said, who has a bike at home but still needs to learn how to ride without training wheels.
“So many kids were really happy to try the new bikes,” she said. “They had so much fun — even though they fell so many times, they got up and kept going.”
Bike Parks for Kids, a Madison-based nonprofit, bought a large shed to hold the bicycle fleet. The storage unit cost over $5,000, estimates the group’s executive director, Lindsay Suttin.
From the beginning, she said Kersten’s passion for the project shone through. “He was very adamant that his kids deserved a brand new Trek bike, just like any other kid in our community might have,” she said of the gym teacher. “It’s kind of a rite of passage in childhood that you learn how to ride, that you have a shiny new bike one day, and we wanted to support him in making that happen.”
After the ribbon-cutting last week, Lake View Principal Nkauj Nou Vang-Vue spoke to a small group of assembled volunteers and community members about the impact of the bikes on her school.
Vang-Vue has enjoyed watching her students gain confidence, she said. Many shied away from the bikes when they first appeared. But eventually, at different paces, they moved from balancing on the blacktop to navigating the forest trails.
“Two weeks ago, I was out here helping a class, and I was helping a little second grader do the same thing, balancing,” Vang-Vue recalled. “Two days later, she was able to get on this trail.”
Vang-Vue is looking forward to expanding the school’s cycling curriculum in the future — perhaps buying balance bikes so that kindergartners and first graders can join their older peers. But for now, she’s enjoying the helmet-clad culmination of her community’s efforts.
At the end of the ribbon-cutting, she coached the group of fidgeting elementary schoolers in front of her to say “thank you” to the gathered volunteers — first in English, then in Hmong.
