Kids Deserve Safe School Playgrounds

Kids Deserve Safe School Playgrounds
Parents shouldn’t have to fundraise endlessly, and some schools don’t even have that option

 

Monique Zander knows firsthand what the lack of a safe and accessible school playground can mean for children. She shared with me the story of when her son attended Tillicum Annex, a small K-4 school in East Vancouver. At the time, the school’s only playground was located immediately beside busy, 6-lane Nanaimo Street, separated only by a small chain link fence. The traffic on that stretch of road was heavy and constant, with cars and large trucks barreling by at high speeds, barraging children with exhaust fumes and the loud hum of tires on pavement. On rainy days, the amplified hiss of vehicles speeding past was unbearable – especially to her son who has special needs. This was a playground that many children found unpleasant, and that her son found impossible to use.

Monique and other parents found the situation unacceptable, but unfortunately, the BC Liberal government at the time disagreed. There were no public funds available for schools to replace ageing, unsafe or inadequate playgrounds. There weren’t a lot of funds in the education system period.

Without government support, Monique and a small group of parents formed a parent advisory council (PAC), and launched almost three years’ worth of bake sales, burger and beer nights, charity bike rides, and raffles. They were luckier than most PACs, in that the small school only required a smaller, less expensive playground, and in their partnership with the local Rotary Club, who matched their fundraising dollar-for-dollar. This meant the PAC only had to raise $20,000, but this still took several years and much of the parents’ spare time. Monique’s son was getting close to moving to the local middle school by the time the new playground was ready and installed.

But the difference to Tillicum Annex was huge. Located now on the quieter and safer Oxford Street side of the school grounds, the new playground included active and sensory elements, and wheelchair-accessible equipment. Whereas the old playground was hardly used, the new one was packed all the time.

 

 

All students in BC deserve a school playground like this one, but sadly for every new playground paid for by the hard work of parent volunteers, there are a dozen others in desperate need of replacement and without the resources to do so.

Take EJ Dunn Elementary in Port Alberni for example. Converted from a middle school a few years ago, the school doesn’t have much of a playground at all – only a small, diamond climbing structure, unsafe for younger children. The parents have been working hard to fundraise, but resources are thin in the community and after a few years they’ve only managed to raise $11,000.

 

For years, the responsibility for playground equipment has been downloaded onto the backs of parents; parents who would prefer to spend quality time with their children, rather than in endless fundraisers. Worse, many schools just don’t have parents with the time and resources to even contemplate raising these kinds of sums. These are parents who already have too much on their plate, working one or two jobs, or just falling behind. Asking these families to bear the burden of paying for school playground equipment only serves to increase the divide between children at schools in more affluent areas, and those at schools that are not.

The situation was unfair and our government agreed. That is why we announced a new, $5 million-per-year playground fund, and this year 51 schools in BC received grants for brand new playgrounds. One of the schools to receive a grant was EJ Dunn in Port Alberni. I heard from my colleague, Mid Island-Pacific Rim MLA Scott Fraser, that parents cried tears of joy and relief upon hearing the news. This is just a start, but this is an annual $5 million program that parents and kids can rely on.

 

 

A playground might seem like an insignificant problem compared to other, perhaps more pressing issues in the province, but they mean a lot to kids and they’re critical to childhood development. Plus, the sorry state of many of our school playgrounds is a visual reminder of the chronic underfunding of our education system and the undervaluing of our children over the last decade-and-a-half.

Just as many children have gone without safe playground equipment, so have many others gone to school in buildings at risk of collapse in a major earthquake. Just as some children have gone without adequate playground equipment or any school playground at all, so have many other children been shuffled into portables from overflowing schools. And just as the students at Tillicum Annex were forced to play next to a noisy major thoroughfare, so too have many others sat in classrooms with far too many students for one teacher.

All this has been a strain and a worry for parents who already have enough to worry about.

It’s time we let parents get back to spending quality time with their kids, instead of in endless fundraisers. And it’s well past time that we started funding the kind of education system our children deserve and our society needs. We’ve started that work this past year by hiring thousands of new teachers, reducing class sizes, accelerating school seismic upgrades, building new schools for growing communities, and of course, finally funding school playgrounds.

It’s the last day of school today. By September, thousands of kids across B.C. will return to discover the delight of a brand new school playground, and their parents will breathe a sigh of relief to have one less worry off their plate. I’m proud to be part of the government that made that happen.