Prospects dim for money to rebuild school playgrounds

(This is the last in a two-part series on playground equipment in public

schools.)

LIHU’E — Public elementary schools on Kaua’i and throughout the

state are looking for cheap, creative solutions to the $8 million plus problem

of replacing their playground equipment.

Department of Education

facilities chief Lester Chuck has directed the 179 elementary schools across

the state to send in plans for their new playgrounds in order to qualify for

state funding.

However, the prospects of funding for playground equipment

from the Legislature this year range from dim to dimmer.

Playground

proposals and bills have been whittled down and whittled down, experiencing

short, mercurial lives this Legislative session.

Initially there was

funding in the DOE budget request for playgrounds, not for the equipment

itself but for assistance on the safety surfacing. The line item was cut from

$3 to $1 million by the BOE. Gov. Ben Cayetano then readjusted the amount to

$400,000.

This amount is barely enough to cover the proposed expense for

playgrounds at two schools on Kaua’i (WIlcox and Koloa, whose price tag comes

to $190,000 and $120,000 respectively), let alone all elementary schools in

the state.

“In terms of priorities, certainly we will acknowledge it as a

need and something that did affect the schools directly, but if we had the $3

million to spare then there are just so many other needs,” DOE spokesman Greg

Knudsen says, adding that implementation of the standards-based system scored

higher on the priority list than playgrounds.

This is borne out by Kekaha

School principal Billi Smith, who says that she has bigger fish to fry than

going after costly apparatus that kids will use a total of 35 minutes out of a

six-hour day.

“Yes, kids need to be engaged. They need to play because

that’s their work, but I am not going to spend 50,000 bucks for kids to go on

it for 35 minutes a day. I don’t think so. It doesn’t make sense.”

Fifty

thousand bucks for playground equipment is what each school would have gotten

out of House Bill 3002. But the bill was reduced from $8 to $3 million before

finally failing to move out of the Senate Ways and Means Committee this month.

In other words, dead.

State PTA president John Friedman, who was

advocating for the bill, says that the onus is on the legislators to come

through for the children.

“Realize that every single legislator is up for

reelection in 2002. We have this opportunity in 2002 to say, ‘Hey, you’ve been

doing the job,’ or ‘Hey, you’ve left our kids without playground equipment’ —

that’s the reality.”

There is still talk that the funding for playground

equipment may be incorporated into the state budget as a capital improvement

expense.

But earmarking state funding for playground equipment has never

been done before, at least in Hawai’i.

Paul LeMahieu, state superintendent

of the schools, says that in the rest of the country playground equipment is

considered part of the facilities of a school and is written into the

specifications for a school.

“Unhappily, that’s not the case here,” he

says.

Knudsen says that an idea was being knocked around in the DOE to

include playground funding as a curriculum-based expense so that it would be a

higher priority item.

“I’m not sure that argument is fully established

yet,” he says.

See-saw of responsibility

Some schools are not holding

out for the state to foot the bill. Many PTSAs on island have mobilized with

fundraisers, while corporations like A&B, Princeville Corp., and others

have donated thousands of dollars to the cause.

Even as PTSAs and schools

forge ahead, there is the question of who should be responsible for paying for

new equipment.

Knudsen says funding for playgrounds is “primarily a school

expense.”

Not so, says John Friedman.

“There is absolutely no question

that adequate, safe, age-appropriate equipment is the responsibility of the

state and the DOE. It is an essential component of an adequate

education.”

He adds that it is unfortunate that parents have been asked to

shoulder the responsibility entirely.

“The saddest thing is that those

communities that are able to afford equipment will have them, but those

communities that cannot, we will deprive those children of that ability. It

doesn’t only smack of inequity, it is inequity.”

Kaua’i Superintendent

Daniel Hamada says that all schools on Kaua’i are at different levels at

trying to replace the playground equipment.

While schools like Wilcox,

Kapa’a and Koloa are looking at large overhauls of their playgrounds, smaller

schools, like Kilauea and Hanalei, have already managed to salvage their

equipment and bring it up to the new safety standard levels by garnering lots

of community donations.

But even DOE officials say that if the department

is going to adopt stringent safety standards, it should also help schools meet

those standards.

“When you say there are certain standards that shall be

applied, it’s almost an obligation that you begin to provide that kind of

equipment that does meet the safety requirements,” says Mitsugi Nakashima,

Board of Education chair.

“It’s pretty intensive stuff that needs to be

done,” he says, adding that training for principals and staff people to handle

the new equipment is also necessary.

The DOE has estimated that replacing

the equipment will cost roughly $8 million. But Friedman says that to do the

playgrounds justice, it will cost at least double that amount.

“Eight

million is based on $50,000 per school and I believe $50,000 is woefully

inadequate,” he says.

The yellow tapes

It was April 1999 when LeMahieu

issued the memo to principals calling for the removal or restriction of the

equipment.

There were several reasons for this, he says.

For one, new

federal guidelines on safety had come in. “And there was a sizable Americans

with Disabilities Act compliance suit with a settlement attached that simply

compels us to deal with the issues of access,” he says.

Kilauea, Wilcox,

Koloa and Waimea Canyon are among 43 schools statewide that need to be made

accessible right away and are first in line to receive funding.

The

department then launched a statewide study looking into the condition of the

equipment in terms of safety.

The results that came in showed that much of

the equipment did not meet federal guidelines of safety.

See-saws, high

swings, jungle gyms, monkey bars and cement tunnels were deemed unsafe. All

equipment had to have at least 12″ of soft ground covering underneath.

“If

you recognize that something is unsafe, you just can’t let it go and say, ‘OK,

we know it’s unsafe but the kids can play on it,'” says Nakashima.

“That’s

what led to all those yellow tapes and created a lot of anger on the part of

people saying, ‘Why can’t you take care of it?'”

“To put it frankly, not

much was done for a long time that should have been done,” says Lester Chuck,

DOE facilities director. He says that when his branch was given the

responsibility, “we just dove in, we can’t wait. We’ve got to take these things

out.”

According to Hamada, this move caught the schools offguard.

“That’s because it came about so quickly. The Legislature at that time had

no funding to support any of the schools, so you were asked to remove the

playground equipment and then you were asked (to be) on your own in terms of

replacing the playground equipment.”

Creative solutions

Each school has

been required to come up with its own playground plan as proscribed by the

DOE.

Principal Ernest Dela Cruz says that the Wilcox Elementary playgrounds

will be streamlined so that it is more functional for different types of

activities.

Most principals say that the unstructured time on the

playground will be realigned to fit the physical education standards. In other

words, killing two birds with one piece of equipment.

Billi Smith says that

she is going for a creative and cheap solution to replacing the playground

equipment at Kekaha School.

“It has to be cheap because we don’t have any

money and we’re going to be doing it ourselves,” she says, adding that her

fundraising efforts per year amount to $7,000.

“And we are spending that

on computers. Sorry.”

Smith says she is planning to spend about $1,000 and

a lot of volunteer hours on constructing five different activity pods that

encourage kids to explore. For example, one pod will have rocklike forms the

kids can hop on — very different from your traditional playground.

Karen

Liu, former principal of Kilauea School, who has moved to King Kaumuali’i, says

that the school polled the kids for ideas about new playgrounds.

“We asked

kids what they’d like to do with their unstructured time, and they said they’d

like a shade tree with benches underneath or a room where you could play

checkers. Playground equipment is nice but kids want other things too.”

A

plan, Chuck says, takes from 9 to 12 months to prepare.

But kids can’t

play on a plan, says Friedman and time is running out.

“If we don’t move

quickly we lose generations rapidly of kids who never get to swing or get to

play.”

Children learn skills like conflict resolution and other social

skills around the swing set, Friedman says.

“We are denying our children

some of that most basic of social interaction skills by not allowing them free

and easy access,” he says.

There’s a million reasons for the state to

provide playground equipment for its youth and the fact that they have not done

so is extremely disappointing, he adds.

It may take time for a state

solution to happen, says Nakashima.

“We have to look at it incrementally so

fiscally it becomes possible,” he says.

“What is the department doing?

Well, this is a massive animal that is sometimes hard to get going in a

particular direction. And sometimes it just doesn’t move the way you want it to

move,” Nakashima says.