Children at a Nanaimo elementary school are spending their lunch and recess breaks on a new accessible and safe playground.
École Quarterway Elementary School officially opened its new playground Tuesday, May 24, with a tour for staff, Nanaimo-Ladysmith school district officials, Nanaimo MLA Sheila Malcolmson and the school’s Grade 7 students.
The facility includes safe play surfaces that include hills covered in artificial turf, monkey bars, a zipline, merry-go-round, climbing equipment, a mole hill with slide and stone benches and other features designed to encourage “natural play” – a design concept that encourages children to discover their own ways to play rather than limiting them to specific activities.
Joyce Troost, parent advisory committee member, has been on the PAC’s playground committee helping to raise money for the playground project.
“I started when my daughter was in Kindergarten and now she’s in Grade 7,” Troost said.
The PAC’s role, she said, is to raise money to purchase the playground equipment and have it installed. It is then turned over to the school district, which maintains it.
Troost, an architect who owns Joyce Reid Troost Architecture, helped create the proposal for a natural play playground concept that was presented to the school district.
“It’s not about dictating how kids play. It’s about giving them fun features,” she said. “The mole hill’s a great example. The social part for the teenagers works on one side and the Kindergarteners can run and jump. We’re not telling them how to use it. We’re saying, ‘Here’s a really cool object and there’s a hundred different things people could do on it.”
Troost said the PAC had raised about $100,000 over eight years, but the $165,000 in funding from the province paid for the playground’s major play equipment.
“It’s a lot of financial hardship on the parents … that’s a lot of money to ask people to fundraise and try to ask people for donations to get this,” she said. “I think it turned out great and, luckily, the funding was there to really beef it up.”
Arlette Kaké, school principal, said the old playground features were made from wood that was deteriorating. Children would bring pieces that fell off it to her office.
“It was dangerous. It was unsafe,” Kaké said. “It means a lot to our school, having a new playground like this. The kids are so excited.”
Sheila Malcolmson, Nanaimo MLA, said the government has committed $30 million over the past five years toward upgrading school playgrounds including projects at Georgia Avenue and Cilaire elementaries. She said 231 school playgrounds will be upgraded across the province under the program.
“The load used to be on parent advisory committees and kids I talked to started fundraising in Kindergarten and they’re in Grade 7 now,” she said. “It used to be a big load on families and schools that didn’t have better-off parents that could make that investment, those schools got left behind, so this is a real equalizer and kids deserve it.”
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