Local gym class includes skateboarding

BROOKVILLE, Ohio (WDTN) - For many students, gym class consists of everything from jumping rope to playing four square and some dodge ball.

Only a lucky few get to say they can skateboard.

Some students in Bellbrook strapped on their helmets and pads Thursday so they can learn to skateboard.

After a few minutes of passing the board and learning how to balance, kids like Allora Hern were off rolling on four wheels.

"I think it's pretty fun. I like to do it a lot with my dad and my sisters like to play with my skateboard," Hearn said.

Hern said she stumbled upon skateboarding and enjoys it.

"When I was checking around my dad's shed, I found this skateboard like back in the back and I asked him if I could ride it and I just started liking it, " she said.

Hern was taken a couple of spills, but thinks the class will help her become a better rider.

The skateboarding class is the first of its kind in the state and the kids really do enjoy it.

They have their teacher, Allan Arnett, to thank for the fun.

He discovered skateboarding as a curriculum in 2002 during a P.E. convention in Philadelphia.

Arnett said, "I saw that it wasn't in Ohio yet and I made it my goal to introduce it to Ohio."

Arnett wrote a grant and was awarded three thousand dollars to get the equipment he needed for the Skate Pass curriculum.

"There were some jokes that the teachers are going to learn to skateboard, but it was something unique that I wanted to do for my students," Arnett said.

Arnett believes in introducing and exposing this students to new activities.

"We've gone on snow skiing field trips in the past. We ice skate at the elementary. We do bachi. We do other recreational type games, anything that they can do to get up and move," said Arnett.

He's found that many students have a skateboard secret.

"I had some students come up to me and say I had a skateboard and I never used it cause I didn't know what i was doing," said Arnett.

At the beginning of the year, more than one million students in The U.S. have been approved to skateboard in school because of the skate pass curriculum.