Most of the money came from a children’s walk-a-thon held at the school that raised $22,000.
By: Steve Rauscher
MONTGOMERY More than 1,000 students at Village Elementary School will have a new place to play come September.
The school’s 900-member PTA donated a $17,000 piece of playground equipment to the district last week, the product of nearly a year’s worth of planning and fund raising.
The donation was necessary, according to former PTA President Andrea Bradley, because the district does not include money for playground equipment in its budget. The PTA already had raised more than $45,000 for the Village School’s existing slides, monkey bars and assorted apparatuses.
"It’s always been an important objective of ours," Ms. Bradley said. "Recess time is so important to kids. It’s integral to their learning cycle."
Most of the money for the project came from a single charity event held last October. The PTA sponsored a children’s walk-a-thon held at Village School, which raised $22,000.
Ms. Bradley said the PTA had always intended to donate a quarter of the proceeds from the walk-a-thon to charity, but when the organization learned of the two Montgomery families that lost members when the World Trade Center collapsed, it gave the $5,000 directly to them.
"We’d intended to pick a local charity that was accessible to the kids, like the EMS or the fire department, so that they could understand," Ms. Bradley said. "And then Sept. 11 came along."
The magnitude and proximity of the event helped the children kindergartners and first and second graders better understand the meaning of the walk-a-thon when they were lining up sponsors from among their family members and neighbors, Ms. Bradley said.
"It was just a really sweet thing to see these kids be so earnest, and work so hard," she said.
The children’s work paid off in a custom-designed playground that should be in place by August. Ms. Bradley said the PTA surveyed Village School teachers and physical education instructors for suggestions on the recreational needs of the children. The result is an apparatus geared more toward older or bigger children, with more overhead bars, as well as the requisite slides and crawl tunnels.
Ms. Bradley said that would come in handy should the district follow through on a proposal to move the third and fourth grade from Orchard Hill Elementary to the Village School, and house grades K-2 at Orchard Hill, as part of a districtwide reconfiguration when the new high school opens in 2004. Not that Ms. Bradley supports the proposal.
"We feel pretty comfortable that, God forbid, Village School should become a third and fourth grade school, that this will be suitable for those older children," she said.
Ms. Bradley stepped down from the presidency of the PTA at the end of the school year ending in June, which will give her a break from raising money for the next jungle gym.
"There are very few people who can say they’ve raised and spent $73,000 on playground equipment," she said. "But I can."