hey don’t necessarily want to meet and plan and petition. They want to skate.
They don’t necessarily want to raise money and write grants and seek sites. They want to skate.
But the group of Dakota Meadows Middle School eighth-graders are finding out that if they indeed do want to skate, they have to do all of those other things.
“Hard work pays off,” Dakota Diener said.
Diener and seven others are part of a Public Achievement group that is advocating a skateboard park for North Mankato.
The group has appeared before the City Council twice and has swayed the council to act.
The details — funding and location, primarily — have yet to be determined, but the group already has pushed the issue further than any previous group.
“We knew other groups pushed for this,” Chris Sparacino said. “We were pretty surprised it went so well.”
So well, in fact, that the council pledged to make a skate park work during the same meeting in which it rejected a plan to give $30,000 to the Vikings training camp group.
“We’re the (Public Achievement) team that did our work,” Diener said. “And they said they’d rather have the money go to skateboarding.”
Said Sparacino: “They turned down the big corporate guys. That was pretty cool.”
The group’s adviser is Jesse Rorvig, a junior at Minnesota State University. He is a budding social studies teacher and a skateboarder. He said the group has worked hard, meeting once a week, to fight for their cause and try to make change.
Other Public Achievement groups have been taking up causes such as school spirit and the humane society, Rorvig said.
“It’s all about action in democracy, even if it is in smaller ways,” Rorvig said. “It’s about democracy at all levels.”
Presenting their plan before the mayor and the City Council was a little nerve-racking at first, the skateboarders admitted.
“I was scared they wouldn’t accept it,” Shane Wilson said.
After the group got into specifics in their second meeting, March 21, Councilman Dave Pearson said: “The time has come to do something. But we’re going to need some guidance.”
Mayor Gary Zellmer thanked the group for exciting the council to act.
The group admitted later it would rather have a park already in place or simply be allowed to skate on downtown sidewalks and other public areas now off limits to skateboarding.
“To go to the City Council just to get a place to skate, it’s a little intense,” Sparacino said.
But they’re learning that’s how the process works — for any cause.
“I think it will really sink in if we actually see the park here,” Sparacino said.