For years, schoolchildren at Prides Corner School have gone home in the afternoons with splinters in their hands from the aging cedar jungle gym at the school’s playground, but that will no longer be a problem.
Prides Corner kids will now be able to clamber and climb over a new plastic “playscape” with a soft layer of bark on the ground. “It’s very smooth,” said Principal Janet Crawford of the new jungle gym. “There’ll be no more splinters, which was a daily occurrence.”
With money from the city and local donations, Prides Corner School built a new playground that is larger and safer than its old one. It will also soon have a new blacktop area to replace the area that has been taken over by one of the school’s portable classrooms.
The new playround for Prides Corner is the latest in the city’s effort to update its four elementary school playgrounds and the playground at Riverbank Park, for which it has allocated just over $215,000.
“(The Prides Corner playground is) bigger, and we’ve added some new stuff like climbing walls,” said Allan Bickford, head of maintenance and grounds for Westbrook schools.
Bickford said to build the new playground, crews cut down a section of trees for more space for the kids. “They didn’t have enough room,” he said.
According to Crawford, the old jungle gym wasn’t up to code and needed to be replaced. She said the playground was built before a relatively recent shift in safety standards and, besides the splintering wood, the spacing was too wide between bars, allowing little limbs to get caught in between them.
Bickford said the structure had deteriorated since it was built about a dozen years ago. He said the cedar jungle gym had been sanded about eight times, but it was beyond hope now.
“You can only sand it so much,” he said.
Bickford said the structure wasn’t safe. “It was dangerous. There were places there where kids could fall off.”
Matt Stacki, father of twins who just left the school for third grade and first grade this year, agreed. “Essentially the structure that was there was mainly made out of wood – and it was old,” he said. “(Replacing it) was just something that had to be done.”
Jason Cole, who has a first-grade daughter at the school, said the splinters were definitely a problem. “It was never ending. Someone was always pulling splinters from the kids,” he said. “The new playground is a huge improvement, a million times safer than what they had before.”
Cole and Stacki along other parents who had helped with the project came out at the end of July after the new playscape was in place to help spread a layer of mulch over the area. Stacki said the kids loved it. “They were all pretty excited,” he said.
Cole was one of the parents who helped on the committee established last September to plan the playground’s renovation. He said his daughter, Sydney, told him the school was looking to replace the playground and she asked if he would help.
“If your daughter tells you to do something, you do it,” he said. Late in the planning process when money for the project ran low, Cole, who owns a commercial excavating company, donated about $4,000 in services free of charge.
According to Cole, the city provided more than $35,000 to the project, but the money wasn’t enough, so the committee had to raise about $10,000 more to get it done, he thought.
Crawford said the project, completed at the end of last month, is the first phase of revamping the playground at Prides Corner. She said the committee will raise more money for additional play structures some time in the future.
Prides Corner was the last school in Westbrook to receive a new playground in the city’s effort to improve its playgrounds, Crawford said. According to City Administrator Jerre Bryant, the other schools have used most of the city money set aside for them. Each school received about $35,000 for their respective projects, said Bryant.
Bryant said that Canal, Congin and Saccarappa schools still have about $15,000 left each for future renovations but have no plans at the moment for additional work.
Bryant said a competitive bid is still out for the renovation of Riverbank Park’s playground, which he estimated could cost about $90,000 to $100,000. At this point, the city has set aside a little over $70,000 and would have to decide whether to scale back the project or find more money, he said.
Next Monday, the City Council will take a preliminary vote on providing another $10,000 to Prides Corner for the next phase of its playground update.
An additional $30,000 to $40,000 would bring the grand total for playground renovation in Westbrook to over $250,000. According to Bryant, however, that amount isn’t an exorbitant amount of money for five playgrounds. While it’s a substantial sum, it’s understandable given that much of the cost goes into the playscapes, which cost conservatively around $40,000 or more each, said Bryant.
Prides Corner is planning an opening ceremony for the new playground for the new school year on Aug. 28.
No more splinters on city playgrounds
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