Bike repair clubs hope to inspire students to bike to school

“I learned how to fix my bike, and it’s liberating,” said senior Silas Hunter East High School and a member of the new East High School Bicycle Repair Club. “Because even if something goes wrong for me, I don’t worry too much about it. I can fix it myself.”

This term, the bike repair club, made up of students like Hunter and adult volunteers, has tuned, tightened or pumped up at least 30 student bikes at the school, all in the name of education and improving the safety of biking to school. reliable. Club members meet every Thursday during lunch to learn a new skill; sometimes they go outside to a “pop-up” to provide free service to any fellow student with a bike.

The club is the brainchild of Andy Nguyen, a senior citizen who also works at DreamBikes, a non-profit organization providing a full range of bicycle services. which hires and trains teenagers. Nguyen first became interested in bicycle repair after picking up some skills in the Boy Scouts.

“I was fascinated by how a bike worked because I had ridden a bike, but I didn’t know what all the cables and parts did,” he said. “After that I dug deeper and then got a job at a bike shop.”

At East High, Nguyen noticed that many of his fellow students rode to school on bicycles that needed basic maintenance.

“A lot of kids don’t know how to inflate a tire, or what a tube is, or how to fix up an apartment, and they don’t have the tools to do it,” he said. He decided, “I want to teach my peers how to take care of their bike.”

Nguyen asked teacher Emily Sonnemann to become an advisor for his new club after watching her bike to school every day (the club now meets in her classroom). He then turned to Ben Varick of Wisconsin Bicycle Federation which works with Dane County high schools to get more students to walk, bike and ride the bus to school. Varik was impressed.

“The first time we met, he reserved a room for our meeting,” Varick said of Nguyen. “He met me at the front door and said, ‘I have a HR consultant, I have a classroom, I have storage.’

The high school student had several donated tools from DreamBikes, but needed help raising money to buy more, he said. He also had to find experienced volunteer bicycle mechanics to teach the students the basics.

Now Varick, along with volunteer mechanic Johnny Hunter, who has a son and nephew in the club, comes to the East almost every Thursday to pass on skills such as repairing chips and replacing brake cables. Varick also asked Bike Fed members to donate unused tools.

The club also received $5,000 grant from the City of Madison. designed to support climate change-related programs led by youth. The money will be used to buy more tools to repair bikes, said Nguyen, who would also like to see some of the funds used to install stronger bike racks in the East.

Several other Madison high schools have followed suit and started their own bike repair or cycling clubs, Varick said. MSCR, or Madison Schools and Community Recreation, and the nonprofit Bikes for Kids Wisconsin also recently teamed up to host bicycle mechanics class at Wright High School.

In the East, skills and labor are key.

The goal is to someday have “students running this whole thing,” Varick said, “with adults on the sidelines.”