Circus comes to town to help benefit playground
Performances benefit
Ocean Avenue
School’s PTA project
MIDDLETOWN — The circus came to town last week, and with it came funds for Ocean Avenue School’s new playground.
No one in the Ocean Avenue School PTA is clowning around when they say that Carson & Barnes Circus is the greatest show on earth.
After all, the circus brought its show to town last Friday and Saturday just to help the PTA raise funds to refurbish the outmoded playground at the school.
"The kids were getting splinters from the slide’s rails, and the bird cage’s springs are so rusted it barely shakes or bounces," said PTA Vice President Michelle Kaiser.
"In fact, it’ll eventually break and fall with some kids in it. It’s a 20-year-old playground that’s out of code and not in compliance with ADA [American Disabilities Act] standards."
According to Kaiser, at the onset of the 1999 school year, the PTA sought help from the Board of Education to remedy what she and other members deemed a safety hazard in the playground.
"The board said they’d pull the faulty pieces of equipment but wouldn’t replace them," she said. "So we took some immediate action on our own. We gathered a group of volunteers to sand and paint the slide ladder and rails. That’s just a Band-Aid solution to the problem, though."
Kaiser and her cohorts decided it was high time to take action in the form of fund raising.
The first thing they did was to name their group "Pennies for Playground." They set up a water jug in the school office equipped with the name and plea of the group, and people dropped everything from pennies to $20 bills in it. There were times that the jug would even accompany them on outings or school functions. They didn’t stop there.
Soon there were $10 T-shirts for sale bearing the saying, "I helped build Ocean Avenue playground."
Each T-shirt sale generated $6 for the playground fund-raiser.
There were other valiant attempts, but they weren’t enough, Kaiser said.
Kaiser estimates that the playground will cost between $14,000 and $25,000.
"We needed to do something that would generate a lot more money and, at the same time, be fun for the kids," she said.
"So I did a little research and came up with Carson & Barnes Circus, which operates out of Oklahoma and is actually the largest traveling circus left in the world," she explained.
Concerned about the type of animal humanity message the circus would give to