Without a stable funding source, some Henrico school playgrounds sit in disrepair

Courtney Champion’s six-year-old son, a student at Springfield Park Elementary School, broke two bones in his wrist after falling on the school’s playground in late October.

“He fell from the wooden structure where the rope climber was attached – except that it wasn’t well attached,” Champion said. “He fell on top of the loose ground cover.”

The first-grader required sedation in the emergency room in order to put one of the bones back in place, and has worn a cast since. Champion, who has been fighting to have the playground at her son’s school replaced since 2019, said that she was furious.

“I was just fuming in the ER, because I said this could have happened, and there was just no urgency on the part of the [Henrico] Board of Supervisors,” said Champion, who is the president of Springfield Park Elementary’s PTA.

Since then, the school has put additional mulch on the ground cover, taken down the “spider web” rope climber structure and boarded up the opening where it used to be, in order to prevent students from falling through. These incremental fixes when a part of the playground is broken have been typical at the school, which, like many schools, cannot afford to replace the playground using parent-teacher association money.

The Springfield Elementary playground, which is the county’s only wooden school playground, was built in 1996. Most of its structure has been there ever since, aside from occasional replacements of pieces of rotting wood and deteriorated plastic.

“They can only react to something when it breaks, or when a child gets hurt,” Champion said. “There are fifth-graders who have spent their entire time at the school playing on a deteriorating playground. This reactive response to something that 650 students are supposed to be using is just not working.”

Springfield Park Elementary is just one of many HCPS schools with old, deteriorating playgrounds in need of repair or replacement. Historically, playground improvements have been funded by school PTAs.

But these days, with PTAs generally not as well-funded as they once were, the idea that they can raise enough money to renovate or replace playgrounds is “not feasible for most schools,” Champion said.

That problem is even more pronounced in poorer schools and neighborhoods.

“Ultimately, this is about children deserving play spaces that are safe, regardless of whether or not their PTA can fund them,” Champion said.

The PTA at Springfield Elementary has been able to raise some money itself, but only enough to purchase one piece of playground equipment – a type of climbing structure called a “wiggle climber.” The new piece of equipment was purchased in 2020 and installed in 2021 and sits next to an old, caution-tape-wrapped jungle gym and the boarded-up wooden structure where the spiderweb used to be.

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In July, the Henrico County Board of Supervisors voted against a school board request to use the county meals tax to fund school playground replacements, opting instead to hold that $1.5 million in reserve.

Henrico supervisors concluded that playground upgrades did not fit within the traditional scope of projects they’ve typically funded with meals tax money: those generally involving security, lighting, mechanical, parking lot or bathroom issues.

The meals tax funding would have covered replacing playgrounds at Ashe, Fair Oaks, Longdale, Springfield Park, Mehfoud, and Gayton elementary schools.

After supervisors vetoed the request for some meals tax funding to go to playgrounds, Superintendent Amy Cashwell proposed (and the school board approved in September) the use of $500,000 from elsewhere in the schools’ budget in order to cover the cost of playground improvements at Springfield Park and Seven Pines elementary schools. However, Champion said that if schools had gotten the initial funding, the Springfield Park playground would have been fixed long before her son was injured.

At a Nov. 10 school board meeting, HCPS Chief of Operations Lenny Pritchard said that there are 32 planned playground renovations countywide and that the school system’s goal ultimately is to replace playgrounds every 10 to 11 years as part of the capital improvement plan. But, no funding source has yet been identified for playground projects beyond the two approved in September.

The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission recommends at least 12 inches of wood chips, mulch, sand, or pea gravel be placed under playground equipment. Virginia playground law does not specify a type of ground cover, though it provides other safety rules such as not placing playground equipment over a hard surface such as concrete or asphalt. It also specifies that playgrounds be firmly anchored “with ground supports that are covered with materials to protect children from injury.”

The county has issued a request for proposals for vendors who can provide a replacement design for the Springfield Park playground, since the original vendor no longer exists. The playground most likely will not be fully replaced until next school year.

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Anya Sczerzenie is the Henrico Citizen’s education reporter and a Report for America corps member. Make a tax-deductible donation to support her work, and RFA will match it dollar for dollar. Sign up here for her free weekly education newsletter.