Island City Elementary Preparing New Playground for a New School Year
By Garrett Christensen on Thursday, July 20th, 2023 in More Top Stories Northeastern Oregon News
ISLAND CITY – Island City Elementary students have something big to look forward to when they get back from summer break. Not only will they be returning to the playground they all know and love, but it’s getting an expansion including all new equipment and a brand-new path around the soccer field. According to Island City Elementary principal Brett Smith, the playground has been several years in the making and will feature fun new climbing equipment, describing:
“We’ve got a fairly large rope climbing structure, it’s like a rope bridge with an arch and there’s some climbing rope between it. It’s like a little maze thing that you climb through, and on, and over. The other is a rope climbing thing, but it also spins. It’s got a basket on it that kids can climb up into and make it rotate around. We’re trying to get some stuff that’s a little more adventurous for some of the older kids to use. Ten- and eleven-year-olds can only go down the small slide so many times.”
For those that enjoy the current lineup of equipment, don’t worry. The project is purely an expansion and won’t be replacing any of the existing structures. What will be replaced, however, is the playground’s pea gravel, which is no longer ADA compliant according to Smith. Instead, the school plans to spread a fresh layer of woodchips. The gravel itself won’t go to waste though, as it will be packed down to form the base of the new soccer field path. As described by smith:
“The path is going to be on the West side of the school. We’ve got a big soccer field out there, the opposite end from the pavilion. It’s just going around the perimeter. We’ve got a backstop and a bank of trees, and the path is kind of going to be between those trees and the fence line. It’s going to be marked in a rectangle shape. It will be surrounded by lots of trees, so it’ll be nice, foresty and shaded. A good thing for everybody.”
As for why the playground is being expanded now, Smith explained that the school’s parent teacher organization (PTO) had simply been wanting to upgrade the area for several years to make it more fun, in conjunction with the gravel needing to be replaced. The path came from school staff wanting to provide a better place to run and exercise as part of P.E. activities. A large amount of the funds came from the PTO’s poinsettia sales and carnival fundraising. Other donations included a ten-thousand-dollar grant from the Wildhorse Foundation, and matching funds provided directly from the La Grande School District. In total, the expansion tallied out to approximately fifty thousand dollars.
As a side note, school staff are incredibly grateful at the amount of work put in by the PTO in generating the funds needed for the expansion, with Smith remarking, “our PTO…I can’t speak highly enough of them, they have fundraised, worked hard, and really helped us out.” Another key contributor Smith mentioned is Mike Becker General Contractor, who was responsible for digging out and pouring the foundations.Currently, construction on the expansion is well underway. Cement footers have been poured, the old gravel dug out and the bases for the new equipment set. According to Smith, the school’s maintenance department estimates the whole project should be finished in the next few weeks as most of the equipment just needs to be assembled on the grounds.
