Passion drives parents to push for top-flight playground

Call her devoted. Call her a multi-tasker. But whatever you do, don’t call Diana White a “soccer mom”.

The mother of four, who chairs the Edmonds Elementary School playground committee, said she doesn’t know what the term means and would rather be known as someone who simply saw a need and tackled it along with like-minded parents, teachers and staff.

In only a year’s time, a determined contingency at the nearly 40-year-old school on Olympic Avenue moved from identifying the need for a better playground to earning $179,500 toward its creation. Fundraising efforts attracted about $47,000. Last month the city of Edmonds kicked in $42,500 from its parks-improvement fund. The Edmonds School District will contribute about $90,000 from the voter-approved capital-partnership fund.

Brian McIntosh, city director of parks and recreation, said “We count on elementary schools for parks in neighborhoods that don’t have a community park.” This one, he added, is the largest of seven park partnerships on which the city and district have collaborated in the last decade.White said the “heart” of the playground will be ready by the start of school next fall. Other improvements will be added as funds allow.

Work will begin this summer on what will be a community park composed of modular play units for every age group, a climbing wall, improved ball fields and basketball court, better pick-up/drop-off areas, room for overflow parking plus improved safety measures. There also are plans for picnic tables, an outdoor classroom carved out of a slope and a 1/3-mile community walking trail.

Some equipment will remain; gone will be the vintage metal swinging rings and metal slide.

The design is the result of hundreds of hours of touring other schools in the area and research via surveys and meetings to find out what children, adults connected with the school and neighbors want, White said. Although neighbors have been relatively quiet on the subject, their observations — such as nocturnal banging on the metal slide — helped shape the plan, she added.

The committee “looked at our problems and figured out solutions,” said White, adding that the volunteers had no formal planning experience. “We sketched things out as we went along.” Everyone had their strengths, she pointed out, such as committee-member Jackie Gilbert, who became a virtual expert in modular play components.

The result was not “just a playground, but a big, giant ‘thing’. I always think of that movie ‘The Perfect Storm’, where everything just came together at the exact same time,” she continued.

The project took off last school year when a PTA playground committee was formed. Core members were White, school librarian Paul Borchert, principal David Meglathery, Gilbert, Denise Olson and Louann Brandjes.

White, a former insurance underwriter and an at-home mom, said new-found courage from a life-coaching class prompted her to volunteer to lead the fund raising.

The original goal was about $45,000, recalled White, who admitted the figure was “pie in the sky” and wasn’t based on any research. “We thought if we could earn $50,000, that would be a ‘home run.’”

She said they began with a $5,000 grant from the Hubbard Foundation. The bank account swelled with a $20,000 donation from the PTA, a jog-a-thon that earned $8,000 in pledges, $6,000 from various fundraisers and $5,000 from the school spaghetti feed.

“It just kind of snowballed,” said White of the effort. Along the way, she recalled, the crew learned of the compounding power of grants and matching funds and tapped those resources as much as possible.

Businesses also got into the act as Windermere of Edmonds kicked in $3,000 and other companies contributed cash and prizes for benefit raffles. Edmonds in Bloom donated $1,000 in memory of the late Bill Hamilton, a popular teacher who, although retired, still taught the rocketry unit at the school.

Meglathery, who goes by “Mr. Mac”, told the city council the work going on at his “Norman Rockwell school” has made him “the proudest, happiest and luckiest principal in the state.”

White, whose committee is poised to order the play equipment, observed “from here on out, it’s gonna be kinda fun.”