As students trickled out of Benjamin O. Davis High School, Juls Pippenger got down to business.
“All right. Circle up,” said Pippenger, a senior at Davis. The students began to laugh as they formed a shape that resembled more of a square in the school’s front parking lot.
Pippenger started by asking each student their name and how long they’d been skating. The answers varied. This was the kickoff for the first meeting this school year for the Davis skate club, and, this time, the students were in charge.
Last year, as part of districtwide school mergers, the club’s longtime faculty sponsor, Dave Shaheen, was transferred to a different school. The consolidations also meant that buildings like Davis, which used to hold two separate schools, were blended into a single high school. It prompted questions about how students training to be pilots and ship captains might get along with students studying film and video game design. The skate club, though, has always been open to everyone.
Shaheen started it three years ago as a way to connect with his students.
“My favorite part was seeing the kids grow from it,” he said. “Like the confidence that they gained from skateboarding was starting to translate into the classroom.”
Now, Pippenger is stepping into Shaheen’s shoes. He’s not particularly nervous about it, though, having spent the summer coaching both adults and little kids at a nearby skate park. It shows at the first meeting, which, even without a teacher in sight, was well-structured and differentiated by ability level.
There are some logistical challenges about running a club without a teacher, however.
“It’s going to be a little bit different. [Shaheen] was in charge of photographing and field trips — the where and how to get there,” Pippenger said. “There is one place I’m trying to take us, it’s North Coast Yard, we just have to skate there.”
‘I want you to keep it going’
Before being transferred to the School of One at East Tech, Shaheen taught social studies at Davis. The club started as kind of a joke between him, a longtime skater, and a few of his students who brought skateboards to school. For a while, he didn’t really believe that they skated.
“We were trying to, like, to feel each other out. It was pretty funny,” he said. “So it was kind of student-led through them, and they just needed a sponsor, and it was something that I’m passionate about.”
Since then, the club has grown with help from local groups like Advocate SkateWorks, which helped Shaheen find equipment. He estimates he’s handed out close to 75 skateboards to Davis students since the club started.
It’s also accumulated a crew of committed students, including Pippenger. That’s who Shaheen turned to this spring after learning he’d be transferred to another school and no other Davis teachers were willing to sponsor the club.
“He has been to every lesson, every summer programming,” Shaheen said. “He’s volunteered so much that it was pretty natural to be like … this program’s special and I want you to keep it going.”
The Davis and Digital divide?
Before the merger, the Davis building housed two different high schools: Digital Arts and Davis Aerospace and Maritime. This year the district folded the two into a single school.
Shaheen remembers after the decision was made “all this talk” of how kids would get along after the merger. He found that almost funny because students from Digital Arts had been coming to the club all along.
“We were always friends with the Digital kids,” said Josh Dannison, another senior who helped Pippenger lead the first meeting. “They could always join.”
At the club’s first meeting in September, the most obvious divide wasn’t between Digital and Davis kids – it was between experienced skaters and those still learning to balance. That split was also a practical one. It allowed Dannison to coach the beginners over on a smoother stretch of the parking lot while Pippenger worked with the other group on ollies and other tricks.
Josiah Owens, a freshman who’s been skating on and off for a few years, is one of the students who has already leveled up to tricks. He hasn’t always been passionate about skateboarding — in a kind of random move, he chucked his first board into a neighborhood bonfire.
But Dannison inspired him to get back into it, and since then Owens has been wanting to learn more tricks, including a kick flip. In pursuit of those, he has already fallen once and sprained his wrist.
Skating-related injuries are pretty common in the club. At the meeting, Lancelot Huntley, a sophomore, showed off swaths of road rash from a fall he took coming down a hill near school.
“I don’t know how to stop very well,” he said.
Pippenger isn’t even allowed to skate right now after recently hurting his hip. Still, he’s there to wrap up the meeting with a simple “circle up.” This time it’s to share something each student learned, and, again, the answers vary. Some students share tricks they attempted or tips on how to build a board, while others just say balancing.
But that’s kind of the point.
“It’s a really great group. We help everybody. Everybody can come in and, you know, learn,” Pippenger noted. “If they’re not comfy, we try and get them to where they are.”
