MARYSVILLE — The 7-year-old twins and their 9-year-old cousin bounded up the steps of a wooden castle at Cascade Elementary School’s Fantasy Playground.
MiLeesha Crews kept an eye on them but stayed out of the way, snapping photos with her phone. She’s mother to Mac and Ma’Taya Frisby and aunt to Malique Crews. They were on the playground just before noon on Father’s Day.
Kaylene Coughlin, 25, chaperoned three other kids, her nieces and nephew. She used to come to the playground for family picnics as a child. It’s one of her favorite places to take the kids, but two decades of wear and tear are showing, she said.
Snippets of conversation offered glimpses into kids’ games. One group fled an imaginary baddie, looking for a likely place to make a heroic stand.
“They’re doing something different from what today’s kids are doing,” Crews said. “They’re putting down technology. Kids need to play.”
The Arlington woman, 33, has brought her family to the castle-themed playground several times. On Sunday, she eyed a post with a jagged hole on top. She pressed her hand against the splitting wood.
“It looks like it needs a lot of help,” she said.
With hundreds of children climbing, jumping, spinning, swinging and sliding on them every day, school playgrounds fall apart over time. Bolts come loose, wood splinters, hinges warp, plastic cracks and metal bends and rusts.
Maintenance workers or volunteers fix what they can, but eventually the damage is beyond repair or the manufacturer stops producing parts.
The cost of replacing aging, worn-down equipment with newer, safer set-ups typically falls on parent groups. It’s also up to them to buy new features to expand a playground. In some cases, the only way a school gets a playground is if parents pay.
It can be pricey and especially difficult in low-income neighborhoods where PTAs don’t have deep pockets. It typically costs $75,000 to $100,000 to buy and put in a new playground.
There are 15 school districts in Snohomish County and more than 100 playgrounds among them. The breakdown of who pays for what varies by district, school and situation. Sometimes the schools and parent groups split the cost. Other times, parents foot the entire bill.
Most districts cover the cost of play equipment for a new elementary as part of the voter-approved bond measure to build the school. The district handles maintenance and the PTA takes charge of efforts to expand or overhaul the playground.
That’s not always the case. Everett Public Schools, the second largest district in the county, doesn’t pay for play structures. Forest View Elementary opened in 2007 without one. A play area was built the following spring thanks to the PTA’s efforts to raise $80,000. It’s the newest of the district’s 17 playgrounds.
“I was just a kindergarten parent at the time but remember how sad it was that we had a brand-new school with an empty spot where the playground should be,” PTA president Laura Peterson said.
At Hawthorne Elementary in Everett, parents and school employees have been working for two years to raise at least $75,000 to replace ragged equipment where accidents have ended with broken bones and a partially severed ear. They’ve raised about $60,000 so far, most of it after the condition of the playground was reported in the Herald and other news sources this spring. The money came from businesses, families, anonymous donors and an online campaign, principal Celia O’Connor-Weaver said.
While they may not always pay to build them, districts are responsible for maintaining playgrounds. It’s cheaper to remove broken pieces than replace them.
That was the case at Mountain Way Elementary in Granite Falls, where old equipment was taken out last summer, operations supervisor Brandon Klepper said. A slide from the 1980s was a choking hazard because gaps could catch a hood or string. Metal platforms between monkey rings were rusted and bent. Ideally, the district would have repaired them, but Klepper couldn’t find the parts.
At Lakewood Elementary, the only piece to be removed in the last 10 years was a balance beam where bolts had stripped and replacement parts weren’t available.
In Lake Stevens, safety standards, not outdated parts, have spelled the end of play equipment. Swings are being phased out in favor of netted climbing areas and a slide was pulled because it wasn’t standard size, district spokeswoman Jayme Taylor said. Some Washington school districts have removed swings altogether, including Vancouver, where a 7-year-old girl died in 2014 after falling off of a swing at school.
Even when parts are available and equipment meets standards, maintenance is expensive. In Marysville, which has 10 playgrounds, the district spent $25,000 this year on repairs, spokeswoman Emily Wicks said.
Falling behind on maintenance increases the risk that kids may get hurt, according to national data.
County and region-wide numbers of school playground injuries aren’t tracked.
The most recent comprehensive national data is from 2009, when the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a report that analyzed numbers from 2001 to 2008. It found that more than 1.78 million injuries associated with playground equipment were treated at hospital emergency departments. That’s more than 200,000 a year. Of those, about 57 percent happened at schools or parks.
Equipment-related accidents, which include breaking and poor design or assembly, were the second most common cause of injuries. They accounted for nearly a quarter of the reports. Falls were the most common, at 44 percent.
Local school officials say most injuries aren’t the result of equipment failures but rather kids being kids.
In Edmonds, a district with 22 playgrounds, no maintenance-based injuries have been reported in recent years, district spokeswoman Debbie Joyce Jakala said. However, there have been problems with misusing equipment. For example, some kids pulled over a soccer goal and others climbed on a batting cage net that then gave way.
Updated and localized data would be useful and may be something the Snohomish Health District looks into collecting in the future, Healthy Communities specialist Wendy Burchill said.
Schools require regular checks of playgrounds. In Arlington, employees are trained to check equipment and examine the playgrounds each week.
Some play areas at local schools are expected to be roped off this summer for repairs, including Stanwood and Twin City elementaries and Arlington’s Eagle Creek and Kent Prairie elementaries.
For playgrounds in need of repairs, grants are an option but money is limited and competitive.
Elementaries in Monroe and Marysville recently won money from the Healthy Kids-Healthy Schools program. Monroe received $198,789 to redo the playground at Frank Wagner Elementary and Marysville got $47,746 for Liberty Elementary.
Some daunting projects are on the horizon as popular play areas built decades ago by volunteers reach the end of their lives.
The Cascade Elementary playground is one of them. Several wooden castle playgrounds were built in Washington in the early 1990s. The arrangement at the time was that a volunteer group would maintain Cascade’s castle, but that group dissolved, Wicks said. The plan is to put in a new playground when the district eventually builds a new Cascade Elementary, she said. That would require voters to approve a bond measure.
Volunteers also built the wooden Kid’s Oasis playground at Mt. Pilchuck Elementary in Lake Stevens. That was 24 years ago. It’s the oldest of nine playgrounds in the district and officials expect it will need to be replaced in the next five to seven years. It’s unclear at this point if that project would be covered by the district, parents, volunteers or some combination.
On Sunday, seven kids clambered around the Oasis. Kyndra Gellerson rocked on a swing with her son Silas, soon to be 2. The chains holding the swing squeaked loudly with every movement. Gellerson noticed but Silas didn’t seem bothered. After a minute on the swing, he scrambled down to check out the rest of the playground.
It’s important for kids to play, Gellerson said. There’s nothing that can replace running and exploring.
She hurried after her son as he toddled toward the aging castles.
Kari Bray: 425-339-3439; kbray@heraldnet.com
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