[ back ]
Residents begin fund-raising effort
(by Mark J. Bonamo - January 24, 2008)
Almost 20 years after the Hackensack community banded together to build the Fairmount Elementary School playground on Grand Avenue, the word has gone out again: the kids need a new place to play.
“The playground we have is just not code compliant,” said Joseph V. Cicchelli, Fairmount Elementary School principal, noting that the wood used to build the structure in 1989 was treated with a chromated copper arsenate solution that is no longer considered safe. “We knew by last October that we were not code compliant for this and other reasons, so we decided to start all over again. That’s the bottom line.”
With the old playground to be torn down starting the weekend of Jan. 19-20, a new fundraising drive has begun in order to meet the bottom line costs of a new 12,000 square foot playground. The playground is scheduled to be built by community volunteers from Oct. 8 to 12. With a target of $180,000 in place, a group called Fairmount School Project Playground is looking to make everything old new again.
Who’s behind it and what it costs
Stephanie Hellpap, president of the Fairmount Elementary School P.T.A., outlined the makeup and agenda of Fairmount School Project Playground.
“It’s a group of parents, neighbors and community members who decided to rebuild this playground,” said Hellpap, 37, noting that the group decided that a complete reconstruction rather that refurbishment would mean spending less money on the project long-term due to potential future compliance regulation changes. “We decided to rebuild it soup to nuts the right way.”
The school has contracted playground architects Leathers and Associates of Ithaca, New York to rebuild the playground, the same company that put up the original playground almost two decades ago. While the cost for the original playground came in at close to $51,000, the price tag has gone up over time.
“The big difference between the price then and the price now is building materials,” said Cicchelli, 54. “We plan to build the new playground with specialized plastic composite lumber so that we don’t have to go through again what we are going through now. As long as you maintain it, the new playground will last indefinitely. But there is no official budget for this. This is being done independently.”
Building more than a playground
Community members and businesses who want to donate can contribute towards various components of the playground, including the tree fort, fire pole, various slides and brick pavers that can be engraved which will border the outside of the playground. For Hellpap, these piece-by-piece purchases towards completion of the playground demonstrate the desire for complete community investment in the new playground.
“We’re a grass-roots project,” she said. “We would almost rather have one hundred eighty thousand people giving us a dollar, because that way we really know that everybody wants to help build this playground. Years from now, my kids can come back with their kids and say look what we did.”
Principal Cicchelli remembers when over 3,000 volunteers came out to build the original playground, including parents, students, businessmen, firemen, law enforcement officials and even trustees from the Bergen County jail. He hopes to see the community come out in droves again to build the new one.
“This is a community-building process,” he said. “People don’t know their neighbors.
There are not enough opportunities for community members to get together and work on a project like this. What we learned in ’89 was that there was a tremendous outpouring of community feeling. That’s why we want to do it again.”
For more information about Fairmount School Project Playground, call 201-681-9657, or visit the project’s Web site at http://fairmountplayground.clubspaces.com.
[ back ]
