Donation from sod farm, volunteer help aids Village Elementary School in Montgomery
By Katie Wagner, Staff Writer
MONTGOMERY — In just a few days the Village Elementary School’s dirt playing field was transformed into grass, thanks to the donations and volunteer efforts of several businesses and groups.
”It was literally a 5,400-square-foot dirt pit and it’s been like that forever. I just got to the point where I thought it was unfair,” said Anne Michaelson, president of the Village Elementary School PTA.
Within a week of Ms. Michaelson’s request for donations to Selody Sod Farm, on Nov. 12, she was promised more than 6,000 square feet of sod.
The next day the school district’s buildings and grounds employees were outside preparing the field. By Wednesday, the six employees, headed by Bruce Fleming, had leveled, tilled and fertilized the field. By Friday, the job was finished. From 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. buildings and grounds employees, along with volunteers from Selody Sod Farm, B. Noloya Landscapers and the Village Elementary School PTA laid the sod, which was delivered and cut by the Selody Sod Farm employees.
”Mr. Selody’s donation is the first step in creating a safe, fun and physically challenging play area that is easily maintained and spacious enough to accommodate the number of children that will be using it now and in the future,” Ms. Michaelson said. “Our children get 20 minutes of recess to run around and enrich the rest of their learning experience and if it’s not a quality one I feel like I haven’t done my job.”
She added, “It was really exciting to get the field refurbished so quickly, especially since what the Village Elementary School has gone through. It’s been a rough year being stuck in the middle of the North Princeton Development Center.”
The PTA’s next step will to be begin raising funds to expand play-structures in the back of the school.
Since the school’s playground was built for approximately 500 kindergarten through second-grade students, it is not challenging or large enough for the 830 third- and fourth-graders that now use it for recess, Ms. Michaelson said.
”The PTA’s job is sort of filling in the gaps,” she said. “The school budget is very tight and I do not think taxpayer money needed to go toward the purchase of sod. The school district’s contribution of labor saved us a lot of money.”
According to Lauri Campbell-Loaiza, a farm owner and PTA member who helped lay the sod, the job would have cost between $3,000 and $5,000.

