CPC working out on playgrounds

The Norwood Community Preservation Committee (CPC) has been debating how the Town should be paying for new playgrounds throughout the last couple of months, and a plan is starting to emerge.

The end result is that two playground projects – one for the Callahan Elementary School and one for the Prescott Elementary School – will be on hold, at least for Community Preservation Act (CPA) funding, for the foreseeable future, and a $30,000 planning study will take their place. The two projects come up to just about half-a-million-dollars in funding requests.

Community Preservation Coordinator Kristen Phelps said the study will basically determine priority for which playgrounds within the Norwood Public Schools District (NPS) need to be replaced and identify all potential funding sources for those playgrounds. That will include the CPA, but also, likely, the Town’s Capital Improvement Plan and private donations through Parent Teacher Organizations (PTOs).

Phelps said back in the day, PTOs could handle the $20,000-to-$30,000 that playgrounds used to cost, but increased safety regulations and accessibility concerns – not to mention economic supply-side and inflation issues – have increased those costs exponentially.

“To date, it hasn’t been handled through the school department, right?” she said. “It’s been handled through individual schools and their PTOs, and the paradigm shift – by necessity due to the cost of these playgrounds – is driving the effort to look elsewhere to fund these things. And the committee members have all said that they want kids to have playgrounds, it’s an important part of the educational experience, but they need the guidance.”

And it is an impending need. Phelps said the Prescott Playground, just for one example, is between 25 and 30 years old. The general life expectancy of playgrounds is around 15 to 20 years, and even if you run the clock and get more use out of them, most companies that build the things stop offering replacement parts by that time, because requirements or trends have changed.

So if a slide is no longer safe, she said they can’t just replace it, and while it’s better than the alternative, a boarded-up slide or missing piece of equipment is not that safe either.

CPC Member Cheryl Doyle said at a recent CPC meeting that there are issues looming as soon as next fiscal/school year.

“There are six elementary schools, most of which have two playgrounds,” she said. “The Willett is going (from just a kindergarten) to K-4 next year, and as its playground is only designed for ‘littles’, they need to do another playground with it to upgrade it.”

Doyle said the biggest problem about going through the CPA process solely for these kinds of projects is that, basically, the CPC would become the only arbiter of funding for school playgrounds, which is not a position she felt the committee should be in.

Doyle said otherwise, the CPC will be debating which playgrounds to give funding to, effectively pitting schools against each other in what would have to become a competitive funding process. Not to mention the price tags of all the playgrounds would become massive.

“It’s going to wipe out our funding,” she said. “We cannot support that many playgrounds. So we suggested that the Superintendent put together a study. We need to know exactly how many playgrounds there are, how big they are, the condition of these playgrounds, what is everybody looking to do on their playgrounds – are they looking at poured rubber or looking at adding elements or adding sensory or ADA equipments? And then it leaves it that CPC could handle a couple a year, but we already know that the flood gates are open next year There are already talks of other schools putting in an application and they were just waiting on those two.”

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“They don’t want to be picking winners and losers and there should be a planned process in place,” Phelps said.

CPA member Joseph Greeley said the funding process is expected to be a collaboration between the Town’s Capital Outlay Committee, the NPS and the CPC. The NPS would propose [a project] based on priority, and the two other committees would followup.

“Then towards the end of the process we get together with Capital and CPC and sort of try to come up with a game plan,” he said “So if they’re asking for $100,000 for a specific playground, maybe it’s 50/50, however we address it. It’s going to be a joint decision.”

Phelps said the PTO’s funding mechanisms haven’t been fleshed out yet, but that they would be an element too. She added that the Department of Public Works (DPW) will also have a role to play and will likely help to keep costs down.

“So for instance whenever (Recreation Department Director) Sam White does playground work, (DPW Director) Mark Ryan and his guys do a lot of the site preparation, which is a huge cost savings,” she said.