This weekend has been over four years in the making, and for me, it can’t come soon enough. On Saturday and Sunday, we finally put in new playground equipment at West Sechelt Elementary School (WSES).
It was during a parent advisory committee (PAC) meeting about four years ago that a few of us moms started talking about the need for an accessible playground at WSES. We had no idea how long a road we were about to set out on.
At the time, we had one student in a walker who couldn’t access much of our playground due to the gravel ground cover. A handful of us decided that wasn’t OK and set out to do something about it.
Soon Susan Shinn, Allyson Fawcus and I formed a playground enhancement committee with a dozen other moms who were raring to go.
In those early days, we were full of energy, ideas and positivity. We were sure we’d have the money for our new playground within months and have it up within the year.
We were wrong.
Other PACs tried to warn us. I think it was a PAC from Gibsons that told us we’d be lucky to get the playground in by the time our kids went to high school. We thought they were just being mean. Turns out they were being honest.
One of Susan’s kids has already graduated and another is set to start high school soon. Luckily, mine were younger when we started. My daughter will get two years to play before she graduates from elementary school, and my son’s got six more years.
Part of what took us so long to get to this point was the accessible nature of the project. The rubber ground cover alone is worth about $40,000, which upped our project cost to $113,000.
Raising $113,000 for a playground takes a long time. It’s not a flashy or necessarily exciting cause for people to get behind, and if you don’t live in Sechelt or have a child with a disability, you likely won’t give gobs of cash to it.
So we took what we could get, and in the beginning it wasn’t much. We held penny drives and bottle drives, bake sales and swap meets, pub nights and silent auctions — and the citizens of the Coast supported us. Whenever we asked for donations from businesses or the community, they came through and we were thrilled, but by the end of year one, we hadn’t even broken the $10,000 mark.
We went all-in on an online contest to win enough to complete the project in year two, only to burn out most of our volunteer force and not win a penny.
Truth be told, I was willing to throw in the towel then, but Allyson and Susan wouldn’t have it. The three of us regrouped and marched on.
Over the years we got wiser. We held more big events and went for more grants. We learned something every time we held an event or wrote a grant proposal and, if we have any energy left at the end of this thing, we’ve talked about writing a manual for the next PAC that’s brave (and patient) enough to take on a playground project.
But before we can revel in our accomplishment and start writing books on how to do it right, I guess we’ll need to finish what we started.
The final chapter comes this weekend when the new equipment is brought to the site and our amazing team of volunteers come out once again to help put it all in place.
Following two days of equipment installation, the rubber ground cover will be poured next week, as long as rain doesn’t ruin our plans.
Once that rubber dries, we’re planning a party to celebrate with the 200-plus students at WSES and the entire community that made the dream possible.
If you see me at that event, I’ll likely have a few tears rolling down my cheek. It’s been a long, bumpy road with peaks and valleys, and I’m overjoyed and relieved to finally see where it ends.
