Monday, Oct. 13, 2008
Lowell parents rally for playground project
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closeLynden volunteers built a community playground last year.
Now some Bellingham parents are planning a similar effort to replace the aging playground at Lowell Elementary School.
In both cases, a New York design firm is part of the mix.
Consultants from Leathers & Associates design playgrounds based on kids' suggestions, then help communities raise the money and volunteers to build them.
In Lynden, residents raised $238,000, plus lots of donated materials and service, and nearly 2,000 volunteers helped build the Million Smiles playground over 10 days.
The Lowell project is smaller, with a preliminary budget of $150,000, but hundreds of volunteers will be need for a five-day work party slated for late May.
"We need your friends, we need your neighbors," Rachel Budelsky, a co-leader of the playground committee, told 150 parents and kids at a rally Thursday evening at Happy Valley Elementary School. "We need your Scout group. We need everybody."
The event was held at Happy Valley because Lowell school is closed for seismic upgrades. When it reopens next fall, Lowell students now at Happy Valley will return to their South Hill school, along with some Happy Valley students who will shift to Lowell because the school district changed enrollment boundaries.
That new mix of students and parents at Lowell next year is one reason the playground organizers chose the volunteer approach taken by Leathers & Associates.
As people in Lynden can testify, the task of raising money and materials for a major playground, then rounding up volunteers to build it, to feed the workers and to provide child care, is one heck of a way to get to know your neighbors.
"You've not only built the dreams of your children, you've also built a stronger community," said Dennis Wille, the Leathers consultant who solicited playground ideas from Happy Valley's students Thursday morning.
The kids had been prepped to think about and draw their dream playground. When Wille asks kids what they'd like, he listens for what's most popular and most unusual.
He took the kids' ideas, along with goals and ideas of the parent organizers, plus his knowledge of what might best work at Lowell, and crafted a playground design that he presented Thursday evening.
His design for the south and west playground areas at Lowell included a tall play structure modeled after old Fort Bellingham, plus a salmon slide, obstacle course, rock wall, twisty slide and a talking tube.
Some kid ideas that didn't make the cut: a hot tub, a roller coaster and a snack bar.
In a related effort, Lowell parents are well on their way raising money and in-kind help to replace the large asphalt area north of the school with a grass field for soccer and other field sports. Organizers hope that work can be done next spring or summer.
For the moment, most of the focus is getting ready for those five days in May.
"It will be a wonderful bonding experience," said Wendy Jones, the parent in charge of fundraising.
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