OCEANSIDE - By the end of May, Ivey Ranch Elementary School students should be able to run laps on the first track ever built at an Oceanside Unified School District elementary school.

The 1/8-mile track will have four lanes created on synthetic turf and room within the track's borders for children to play field hockey and soccer.

The track won't cost the district anything. It's being built through donated labor and services arranged through the Gibraltar Foundation, co-founded two years ago by Karen Johnson -- a mother of three Ivey Ranch schoolchildren - to promote health, nutrition and fitness.

The school's principal and physical education specialist said the track will be a great boost to its efforts to get children to exercise.

"This is the most fantastic effort of the community coming forward to support the students at our school," Principal Faye Wilson said Thursday.

The school has received help buying computers and copy machines from its parent-teacher organization, but Wilson said it has never received a gift from parents of this magnitude.

"I think the value is without words," Wilson said.

Johnson spearheaded the effort to build the track three years ago, after observing many overweight children at a YMCA.

"There are so many chubby kids," she said. "There's a childhood obesity epidemic."

Building the track will enable the school to have a track program, school officials said, and give classroom teachers an additional way to help students get exercise.

Students receive some instruction from physical education teachers, but classroom teachers are expected to fit in most of the 200 minutes of exercise that state law requires elementary schoolchildren to get every 10 days.

Johnson said the idea for the track materialized after she and her best friend, Wendy Kroenke, the administrative secretary at Ivey Ranch, went for a walk and began talking about bringing a 5k fundraiser to Ivey Ranch.

Two years ago, Johnson used $30,000 of money she inherited to co-found the foundation with Kroenke. After it was launched, Johnson asked business owners if they would be interested in supplying labor and materials for the effort.

She said she found enormous support.

John Laing Homes, a developer building 350 condominiums across the street from the school, offered to grade the site, improve the drainage system and pour the concrete curbing that will hold the track's turf.

Wally Huddleston, a land development superintendent for John Laing Homes, said the developer does some charitable work and wanted to help.

"(The foundation) came and approached us, and since we were right across the street, we thought we could lend a hand very easily," Huddleston said.

Johnson said the track will benefit the community as well as the school because adults will be able to use it and recreational soccer teams can play or practice there.

Linda Mannes, the school's physical education specialist, said the track will enable her to relaunch a running club she once had and give her a place to teach hockey and soccer.

"I'm actually teaching hockey on blacktop," she said.

Mannes used to have children running around cones on the rundown field where the track is being built, but, she said, that didn't work well.

"It was a horrible field," she said. "I played on it because that's all we (had). It'll be much nicer now."

Workers were digging trenches at the track this week so pipes can be laid next week to irrigate grass and shrubs that will be planted around the track's perimeter. In early May, the turf will be laid inside the track's ring, said Johnson.

Johnson plans to continue efforts to improve children's health by launching a healthy snack program in 2008 that would give all district elementary students fruit at recess on Fridays.

She's also hoping to promote the idea of building tracks at elementary schools throughout California.

- Contact staff writer Keith Rushing at (760) 901-4151 or krushing@nctimes.com.