Pupils Help Design Play Area
By SHARON L. BASS
Published: November 20, 1988
AT Melissa Jones Elementary School in Guilford, one pupil wanted a built-in, heated swimming pool. Another wanted a water slide. Still another insisted that a roller coaster was a must.
While none of their wishes were granted, those children, and dozens of other pupils at the school, played an important part in the design of a playground to be built at Melissa Jones next spring.
For the last few weeks, they have made crayon renderings and three-dimensional designs out of construction paper depicting what the new playground should look like. Last Monday, their well thought out plans were looked at by John Dean, an architect with the Ithaca, N.Y., architectural firm of Robert S. Leathers. The concern, which designs playgrounds, is known for including children's ideas in its structural plans. The Children Know What They Want
The children ''know a lot more about what they want than I do,'' Mr. Dean said during his visit to the school. ''The kids really provide the magic,'' he said. ''They get me really psyched up. They're incredible. Without them it would be boring. It would be like Christmas without kids.''
Mr. Dean spent the day talking with the children and going over their designs of castles (one included a separate boys and girls entrance); haunted houses replete with ghosts, spider webs and bats; teepees and jungle scenes. By midday, he sat at a low table in the cafeteria with tracing paper and colored pencils, while munching on a school lunch, to combine their ideas with his. The children hovered over him to make sure he was getting it right, they said.
''The old playground is boring,'' said Darcy Lagueus, a first grader who said she would like a heart-shaped castle.
Although it will not be heart shaped, the children will get a castle as part of the $40,000 project which will replace the existing playground of metal monkey bars, slides and rings.
All of the new playground apparatus will be built with Southern pine wood, which, Mr. Dean said, is highly flexible and can be bent and shaped into almost anything. A Dinosaur and a Haunted House
The plans include a large structure shaped like the tyrannosaur dinosaur whose tongue will be a slide, its torso a climbing area and its tail a tunnel; a haunted house with an interior jail; a castle with two towers and bridge; a sandbox; pirate ships; a fun house with a maze and scary pictures, and a ladder built to a chimney with an attached slide.
As with other playgrounds designed by Leathers, the community will get involved, said Sandra Whelan, president of the Parent-Teacher Organization at Melissa Jones and a parent of one of the students. Mrs. Whelan and Rosemary Bunton are co-coordinators of the project called ''Let's Build a Playground.''
''The whole point of this playground is to get everyone involved - parents, civic groups, high school students, friends,'' Mrs. Whelan said. As a consequence, the playground will be open to the community, except during school hours.
The idea for the playground came from Mrs. Bunton (a Guilford resident who will have a child in the school next year) after she saw a playground designed by Leathers at a school in Cape Cod last spring. She said that although the project should cost about $40,000, the bulk of which is to cover the cost of the wood, she estimates the playground's worth will be about $150,000. Community Involvement
The labor and materials other than the wood, like cement and nails, Mrs. Bunton expects will be donated. She said she hopes parents and other people in Guilford will build the playground. It should take five days to erect from the first nail to the last, she said.
''The children are seeing what all these people can do as a community,'' Mrs. Whelan said.
The Parent-Teacher Organization has donated $4,000 to the project and $6,000 has come from a benefit concert recently held in a church in Guilford. In addition, the students have been collecting bottles door to door and have raised more than $800. Rejected Fantasies
After reviewing the children's designs and incorporating many of their ideas, Mr. Dean told the children exactly what the playground would consist of. Some students, however, held tenaciously onto their rejected fantasies.
''I'd really like a suspended airplane to play inside, with steps leading to it,'' said 6-year-old Andy Nelson.
A first grader, Erin Meaney, let her imagination go. She said the playground needed a heart-shaped maze with trees ''that block you off.''
''So they have to have little doors that go through them like in Alice in Wonderland,'' she said. ''And there'd be a cardboard man who would go back and forth trying to get out of the maze.''