Building Playgrounds, Engaging Communities: Creating Safe and Happy Places for Children

1. How to Fit a Playground through the Back Door

1 1 How to Fit a Playground through the Back Door My heart pounded in my throat, and I could feel the blood rushing through my ears. The twelve laughing children were suspended in air, defying gravity as they gripped the steering wheel and railings of the model fire truck, which balanced precariously at a 45-degree angle from the ground. “Turn!” the leader shouted, and the other children shifted their weight starboard in one smooth motion, bringing the truck back down to the earth with a metal against concrete crash that reminded me a little of nails on a chalkboard. I was watching “Put Out the Fire,” the favorite game of the children of Beechwood Elementary School, on their favorite piece of play equipment. As the children bounced along on the spring-loaded truck, I could hear chatter between the “radio” and the driver, while the kids gripping the railings let go to begin putting on imaginary fire gear. “ETA five minutes!” the driver yelled back to his firefighters. “Pull left!” The children grabbed the railings again and leaned toward port as the large metal fire truck vaulted onto two wheels to take a fast corner in slow motion. The smiles on the children’s faces showcased their confidence and sense of adventure; my pounding heart and clenched jaw betrayed my concern for their safety. My presence at Beechwood was completely arbitrary. When I was in graduate school, I was lucky to befriend Mary Sansalone, a civil engineering You’re not going to give up on us now, are you? —Georgia Jenkins 2 / Building Playgrounds, Engaging Communities professor who was the faculty advisor of the Cornell University civil engineering student club. One of the students in this club had designed a playground , and Mary had assisted the student in making the design a club service project. I participated in a day of service for building that playground, which was constructed at a local school. The project stuck in my mind, and when I considered projects for my first-year engineering students to undertake as part of their engineering design experience, I thought about playgrounds. Their appeal is universal, and virtually everyone is familiar with them; I thought that a playground design could be moved into the classroom as a project. I shared these ideas with a group of friends over dinner one night, and upon hearing my thoughts, Ramona Patterson jumped up from her chair and said, “I am a teacher at Beechwood Elementary School and you can do our school playground! Wait until you see it, the kids really need a new playground.” I visited Beechwood for the first time in the fall of 1998. The first place I went on the school campus was the first place one should always go when visiting a school: the front office. There, I met Georgia Jenkins, the principal at Beechwood. Principal Jenkins should be on the poster for outstanding school leaders; she was competent, professional, and had the best interests of all 325 children at Beechwood in mind and in heart. She was a master at “time on task” and at simultaneously keeping a tight ship while providing a nurturing environment for her students. Georgia gave me a tour of the classrooms during instruction and of the playground during recess. She informed me that the playground had been built in 1960, the same year that the school was constructed. The playground was then thirty-eight years old, six years older than I was at the time, and much worse for the wear. It was during this visit that I saw the children play “Put Out the Fire” for the first time. My heart-stopping nervousness was appropriate . I learned later, in playground safety school, that impact failures, in which equipment falls on top of children, were one of the main reasons How to Fit a Playground through the Back Door / 3 that children are killed on playgrounds. Luckily, this never happened at Beechwood. I made a couple of more visits to Beechwood in the fall of 1998, meeting the teachers and some of the students; we planned when my students would come to meet with Beechwood students to start designing a playground. We were careful to work around the children’s school schedules so that the children would receive maximal instruction but would also have a chance to interact with my students to talk shop about play and...