Charlottesville Teacher Launches Virginia’s First High School Skateboarding Program
Peter Hufnagel. Photo credit: Amy and Jackson Smith for C-Ville.
A Virginia schoolteacher has cut through the red tape of the school system and got skateboarding accepted as a teachable program—you can call it the “Shred Poets Society.” Charlottesville’s Peter Hufnagel, the Director of Innovation at the Miller School at Albemarle, decided last August to start a skate team—the first of its kind in the commonwealth, which includes states Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The idea is that eventually they would compete against other schools in Virginia, which would go a long way in getting skating accepted as not only an after-school activity, but as an extracurricular activity as well.
The C-Ville blog published an interesting profile of the progressive teacher with the eye-catching last name yesterday—read it here.
This is the golden age of growing up as a skateboarder, and we may have to thank the Olympics for that. Overall, skateboarding is being seen in a positive light by the mainstream and bureaucrats alike, with the excitement of the 2020 Summer Games painting skating as physical activity with untapped potential for positive personal growth. Imagine that.
We profiled another teacher who understands how skateboarding can be use in an educational context last week. Watch our feature with Ventura’s Ryan Oas, below:
