With a sigh, Violet Ruiz planted her blue sneakers onto the grass behind Abbot-Downing School. Standing over her bike, she adjusted her blue helmet so it sat squarely over her dark braid.

“I keep falling off,” she said.

And indeed, the spongy spring grass in the school’s field was tougher to pedal over than the smooth gym floor where her physical education class had started the day. Aching tired, her legs worked to keep the bike moving fast enough to glide over the lawn. The front wheel would wobble and she’d have to kick off again.

Around her, Ruiz’s fellow first graders rode at different speeds in circles along the fence line. Some sped around the track, standing on their pedals with ease. Others, still getting the hang of it, gladly accepted a steady hand and a reminder from teacher Patrick Casey: “Feet on, then pedal hard.” Several kids, on pedal-less balance bikes, pushed off the ground and glided as long as they could, building their confidence over two wheels.

Ruiz kept going, though, getting another lap in before Casey blew the whistle, sending the class back inside.

Elementary students like Violet across Concord are now learning how to ride a bike in gym class as part of a program that began this year. A cadre of bikes and helmets are passed from school to school during the year for kindergarten through second grade. With a donation of more bicycles to Mill Brook School for next year, the program is expanding.

Mill Brook physical education teacher Matt Finney said the program has been transformative for his students.

“I’ve never taught anything that kids were this tuned into, like this magnitude,” said Finney, and that includes his decades as a classroom teacher. “Do you remember learning how to ride a bicycle? Most people do. It has that kind of an impact.”

Dozens of kids in Finney’s classes made the jump from a balance bike to a traditional one, he said, building confidence and persistence that extends outside of gym.

“Kids came in and were like, ‘Well, I can’t ride a bike.’ And at the end of the three weeks, whether it was the balance bike or the pedal bike, they believed that they were a bike rider,” said Mill Brook Principal Katie Scarpati. “Sometimes, you don’t get to see that in education in a three-week period.”

Schools nationwide are launching bike riding and bike safety programs, including a similar one in the Kearsarge Regional School District. The program came to Concord through a partnership through Tim Blagden with the Central New Hampshire Regional Bicycle Coalition and Friends of The Concord-Lake Sunapee Rail Trail.

To Blagden, according to his donation offer to the school board last year, the program is a natural extension of Concord’s increasing status as a hub for cyclists, building on the foundation of added bike lanes, rail trails and bike fix-it stations around the city. It also adds to a grant-funded mountain biking program that was added at Rundlett this year, too.

In his offer, he noted that some of the money that helped pay for the bikes bought for this program came from proceeds from Concord’s annual bike swap, run by the Bicycle Coalition.

For a number of reasons — high equipment costs, rising car ownership among parents, fears about traffic volumes, technology use, sprawl and school consolidation, among others — kids just don’t bike as much as they use to.

These programs aim to reverse the trend.

“It used to be universal: Everybody rode a bike growing up,” Blagden said at a school board meeting last winter.

When asked about the effect of the program at his school, Abbot-Downing Principal Anthony Blinn’s response is to point to the school’s bike rack. It’s full. So is the extra one they added next to it. A few bikes are just parked on the grass.

In the highly residential South End, it’s easy for kids to bike to school and they’ve really taken to it, he said. A group of parents and teachers started a bike bus and set up bike rodeos on some weekends.

“We have bike lanes that lead right into our school. We have a crossing guard out front,” Blinn said, “Everything is set up for this to be successful here.”

Over at Mill Brook, Scarpati said the impact of the program reaches into the classroom: teaching kids they can learn hard things, or that it’s OK to be at different stages of the learning process.

At Mill Brook in particular, where more kids live in neighborhoods that aren’t insulated from busy traffic, getting this skill in school is as essential as ever.

Finney said that he can tell which of his students don’t get as much exposure to outside play and exercise at home. They’re breathing harder in class, getting winded on a walk around the nearby trails. Teaching the basics at school helps level the playing field.

Through the coalition and a donation from the Kopf family, Mill Brook will have its own fleet of bikes to use next year, and the district’s supply will rotate between the other elementary schools. Having their own set means kids at Mill Brook will get more time to spend on the bike unit in class.

From Finney’s view, bike riding is one of those essential life skills that, in previous generations, was expected to happen at home, but that schools are now stepping in to ensure everyone gets. He would teach his students how to swim if he could — it’s the same principle.

“These kids are so deserving,” he said. “Every kid, every person, deserves to have those experiences in life, and I think bike riding is one of the top 10.”

Catherine McLaughlin can be reached at cmclaughlin@cmonitor.com.