Three Lagunitas School eighth graders are one step closer to building a skate park on campus, after the school board officially recognized their skate club and cleared the way for fundraising last week.
Ian Andrews, Atticus Bliss-McHone and Dylan Grimmer have spent the year organizing the club and planning the park as part of an assignment called the Change Project, designed as a way for students to engage with their community. They have provided written answers to the board’s questions about maintenance and liability, and faced down skeptical trustees.
“These boys have been incredibly patient,” said Katherine Sanford, the middle school social studies teacher who leads the project. “They’ve had meetings with adults that they don’t know, where they’ve had to demonstrate a level of professionalism that we don’t typically expect from eighth graders.”
Ms. Sanford said students have worked on similar projects in the past two years, but this group has had the greatest impact. After initially running into resistance from trustees, they met with county officials in hopes of finding some land for the park. Supervisor Dennis Rodoni and parks director Max Korten were encouraging, Ms. Sanford said, but didn’t have land to offer. By the time the group returned to the school board to present their case in February, they were prepared.
“Since we had been working on this project for so long, we knew what we were talking about and what to say,” Ian said. “So we just spoke our minds.”
Dylan has been working on the skate park since seventh grade. He said Lagunitas has become more friendly to skateboarding in recent years: “When I was in second grade, I used to bring my skateboard and I’d try to skate through the halls, and I’d get it taken away, so it’s great that it’s changed so much even since then.”
Atticus and Ian started off with their own group project, an effort to get law enforcement and business owners to recognize them as skaters. (Atticus said they had the police called on them many times for skating in parking lots and other outdoor spaces around Fairfax.) They decided to team up with Dylan when his partner moved away, and they realized they shared the same goal.
They formed a club, called the Valley Skate Club, which emerged from the skate elective at Lagunitas—itself a product of an earlier eighth-grade Change Project.
Adam Vurek teaches the skating elective. He grew up skating in Fairfax and now has a seventh grader at Lagunitas, so the students feel he understands their goals. He said earlier iterations of the project got caught up in bureaucracy, but this group was persistent.
“It was amazing to see how much support they got,” he said. “It felt like all of a sudden the door swung open.”
Mr. Vurek has been teaching skating on flat ground outside of the school and is looking forward to building the park—likely a four-foot high wooden half-pipe and a concrete pad with wooden obstacles. The plan is to build it on the slope next to the bus lane on the upper campus parking lot. He’s sure the park will shift over time. “The idea is to encourage the kids coming up to take it on as their own,” he said.
Jeff Lippstreu, the district’s chief business official, also helped get the project off the ground. The February presentation helped change his mind, and he saw it as a valuable experience for the students. “It’s really shown them how the process can work,” he said.
The students, like their predecessors in last year’s eighth-grade class, faced some resistance from the board and administration. Mr. Lippstreu was initially opposed to the project, and board member Denise Bohman, who sits on the district’s facilities committee, still has questions.
“My specialties on the school board are finance and facilities,” Ms. Bohman told the Light. “I often get to be the bad guy, whether I like it or not.” Her concerns focus on liability and cost, but she commended the students at last week’s board meeting, saying, “I think they’re going in the right direction.”
Dealing with these kinds of challenges is one of the lessons of the Change Project, Ms. Sanford said. “Just because one person says no or one door closes, you just find another door,” she said.
Now that their club has been approved, Ian, Atticus and Dylan have a GoFundMe page and will sell skate club merchandise to raise money for the park. It may take until winter, but Mr. Vurek points out that skaters in the valley will reap the benefits for years to come.
To contribute to the project, search “Lagunitas skate park” at Gofundme.com.