Students jumped with joy, hugged one another and squealed with delight as teachers at their Neptune elementary school revealed hundreds of custom-made bicycles beneath parachutes normally used for P.E. class.
The new set of wheels Wednesday came courtesy of fourth-grade teacher Shanay Robinson.
Monmouth County School District teacher Shanay Robinson said riding bikes was such a large part of her childhood and wanted her students to grow up with similar memories.
“I made a really conscious effort to watch their faces and let it soak in and imprint in my brain when those tarps went up,” she told TODAY. “It was that moment I’ve been waiting for seven months.”
But the idea originated more than a year ago.
Robinson, 48, teaches at Shorthills Elementary School. Last year, one of her students mentioned how much he wanted a bike for his birthday. His parents couldn’t afford to buy him one.
“I started thinking about all the other kids who might not have bikes. We take a lot for granted and we forget that there’s a large category of kids out there who don’t have bikes,” she said. “That was such a large piece of my childhood memories, and I immediately thought, ‘oh, they’re not getting that!’”
Monmouth County School District/Facebook
Staff at Short hills Elementary School in Neptune, New Jersey, help with the big reveal.
She thought about raising money for the boy, but then thought about her other students — and then the kids from previous years. Eventually, she included the entire student body, even if some already had bikes.
“I don’t want to leave anybody out,” she said.
In January, Robison started a “Every Kid Deserves a Bike!” GoFundMe page and set a $65,000 goal, enough to buy bikes and helmets for the 650 students at Shorthill. Within three months, she had raised more than $82,000.
Robinson wanted to give the bikes away as soon as the weather broke, but she underestimated how massive the project would become.
“This was an entire second job for me, when I got home from work until midnight every night,” she said.
Radio Flyer donated 100 big-wheel tricycles and training bikes for the pre-school students, while a local business, Affordabike, worked with Robinson to customize the remaining 550 bicycles, each one named “The Future” and adorned with “Let’s go places.”
The campaign not only earned bikes for students, it won a GoFundMe contest and a $10,000 donation for the school, which applied it toward professional training for the teachers.
Beyond the children’s reactions — and the hugs from parents as they picked up the bikes —Robinson said she’s enjoyed the sense of community created by strangers around the nation who donated to the campaign. It was support she hadn’t anticipated.
“I just thought this would be a nice thing to do. Then things started rolling. It was first local, and then it became this country-wide thing,” she said. “All these people who don’t know our kids, who don’t know our school, gave their hard earned money.”
She tried to relay that idea to students at the unveiling, even though she knew they probably were too young to understand.
“But maybe one day when they’re adults, they’ll know that this gift, it wasn’t from me. It was from our community and our country,” she said.
On Wednesday, Shanay also announced a new fundraiser for a non-profit charity she created, Going Big, to continue her mission of providing children with bikes and “other forms of joy,” such as swim lessons, and summer camp.
Neptune, NJ school teacher Shanay Robinson raised enough money to buy new bikes for each student in her school
