Kids design playground; teacher gets $50K grant
300 Volunteers at Playground Revitalization!
R.C. Molina School – Camden, NJ
CAMDEN — Aging playground equipment at Rafael Cordero Molina School in Camden will be replaced with a new play area that was designed by the project's biggest critics -- the students themselves.
Jacqi Burgos, a first-grade teacher who is starting her fourth year at Molina, is now looking for donations from the community and 100 volunteers to help assemble a new playground system when it arrives in mid-October and feed the work crews over two days.
Volunteers would assist school and district staff members, parents, and 175 workers from data-processing company, SAP America Inc., and the nonprofit Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation on the project.
The playground system will feature three slides, a tunnel, monkey bars, a 6-foot rock wall and balancing beam. It will be built in a 2,500-square-foot play area that would be beautified with murals, asphalt paintings, benches, picnic tables and landscaping.
A $50,000 grant for new playground equipment was awarded to the Molina School, which has 600 pupils.
Burgos applied for the grant online during her summer break and provided 25 typewritten pages that included extensive information about the school, history and student demographics.
"When I heard we got the grant, I started to cry because I was so happy for the kids. It's always about the kids," Burgos said.
A delegation of 50 students was asked to visualize their new playground and sketch out their designs on paper. But the initial designs weren't the pie-in-the-sky concepts one might expect but rather -- nothing more than a sliding board and swings.
"No one had the background knowledge of what a playground is supposed to look like," Burgos explained. "They just haven't been exposed to it. They had no point of references."
However, Burgos got the desired responses after handing out some reference material: Color catalogs of playground equipment from Play World.
"They went nuts!" she said.
The second drafts included drawings of rockets, slides, ball pits and even a swimming pool. Teachers and parents then matched the playground equipment in the catalog with the children's designs, Burgos said.
The current playground is safe but dates back several decades and has monkey bars, two slides and worn playground equipment that resembles a fire engine, Burgos said.
Burgos has been trying to find funding to replace the outdated playground equipment for three years before discovering KABOOM!, a nonprofit program that arranges for community members to build a playground for children who need it most.
The new play area would be twice as large as the current playground.
KABOOM! assigned a design team to incorporate the concepts from the pupils' drawings in the design plans for the actual play area and stored the computer-simulated graphic on a multimedia CD.
Principal John Donohue praised Burgos for her hard work in obtaining the grant and commended staff members for their cooperation in preparing the site. Preparations included soil tests to confirm the playground area was free of contamination.
"We had to do a lot in a short time," Donohue said.
"Students are so excited," Burgos said. "They can't understand that what you see on screen (from the CD) is going to be outside. Teachers can't believe it's going to go up in one day. All four first-grade classes can go out at the same time and play on it and that's something that has never happened. I'm so excited because I can't believe it's going to happen. I definitely feel like I'm giving back."
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