New Equal Access Playground at Burton

by Allison Jones

Friday, 18 November 2011, at 1:00 pm Burton Elementary School hosted a ribbon cutting for their new special needs playground. 

The PTO wrote a program that the children performed which promoted diversity. They told stories, showed pictures they had drawn, and sang songs. The children had been practicing this program since the beginning of the school year.

Also each person or group that donated to the project were announced and thanked. The bulletin handed out at the program provides the whole list which is quite long. The former principal Jordan Busby and Kendra Angel, who led the effort for the playground, both received enthusiastic and boisterous cheers when their names were called.

Tisha Flora and Kendra Angel both answered questions about how this project came to be. Originally the PTO was only looking to get a new regular playground because the one they had was not large enough to serve the number of children at the new school. But then the special needs teacher asked what would be done for their students. A very nice regular playground would cost $27,000 and they wondered how they would raise even that much money; a special needs playground cost $200,000.

But once they realized that Carly, one of their special needs children in kindergarten, could not participate in any of the activities provided in a regular playground they began to see this as a moral and ethical issue. The PTO decided that they could not justify to themselves leaving some of the children out of the play activities that the rest of the children can use. Because of the generosity of the community it took only eight months for the $200,000 to be raised.

Recreation Today is the company that built the playground. Their representative said that on average it takes 100- 200 hours to put together a playground, but because their crew has twenty years experience they were able to get it done quicker. Each piece has around one hundred bolts that must be attached and the surface is made of individual tiles. It took only a week to build the structure and a week to lay the surfacing tiles.

There are many unusual toys available on it such as musical toys for those who don't like to play with others and the tea cup for those who like to spin. These are attractive activities for those with autism. The ramps also allow those with physical disabilities to use the slides and such on the structure. There are also swings that have a bar that fastens the person into it so even those children completely lacking voluntary movement can enjoy them.

There are about a dozen special needs children are in Burton Elementary itself and there are about seventy-five special needs preschool children who also use the school and playground. They are rotated in four classes so that not all of them are present at the same time. The new equal access playground will get a lot of use for the next twenty to thirty years.