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.
