Fort Yuma Rotary Builds Playground for Local School
Members of the Fort Yuma Rotary spent their weekend building a playground from scratch for preschoolers of James B. Rolle Elementary School following sixth months of fundraising and planning.
"I knew that they had done this for other schools so I approached incoming president Kortnee Garcia and asked her if their project could be our school this year," Ott explained. "This is being built for our preschool program. We have two classes and we didn’t have any permanent playground."
Ott says that while the school had a lot of "little tyke things" they were not appropriate for licensing.
"We had to take them down and we had a need for a playground," Ott said. "This one is only going to be accessible to the three and five-year-olds that we have. It’s going to be built a little more to their specifications and we have to separate that from the rest of the population of kids. We can’t have the preschoolers with the older kids and now we can be out here at the same time as kindergartners and first graders.”
Part of the weekend's project was to move fences back and model the school's yard in a way as to separate the preschool playground from the rest of the area. Ott explained that when the school's outside play area was created there was "one group of 13 students quite a long time ago."
"Not only are getting the play structure but a lot of extra space," Ott said.
According to playground project manager and member of the Fort Yuma Rotary Dan Tortolano, the group has been working since June to bring the playground to fruition.
“I probably did eight or nine different designs,” said Tortolano. “Then the designs evolved from there and we picked from those.”
Tortolano said that the Rotary ordered the equipment for the play structure in early September and it was recently shipped from Oregon.
"During all that time we raised funds and worked with outside companies that donated materials," Tortolano said.
In total, Tortalono said the project itself is an excess of $22,000 which was raised through various means from donation block parties to the spring fest as well as other fundraisers.
Additionally, Tortalono says that 50 tons of pea gravel was donated by Don Peterson Engineering. Ahern Rentals provided equipment used for assembling the playground, Affordable Fence aided with fencing, the school district's maintenance helped with labor, and 84 Lumber provided a discount on the materials used for cementing.
"It’s really been a great community effort between the companies that have helped us," Tortolano said.
The actual process of implementing the new playground took a total of three days, with Rotarians working from the early hours of Friday morning up until Sunday. The playground is to be presented to the students in a small ceremony on Tuesday.
Though this is the Fort Yuma Rotary's fourth time building a playground for a local school, Tortolano notes that this playground design is unique in that it will include a 20 ft. square sail shade.
“This will have enough shade so that the children can play with it in the hot months and the shade helps it from fading and the plastic from deteriorating,” Tortolano said.
In addition to the play structure, Tortolano says that the Rotarians will be painting games in front of the classrooms for the children. Additionally, the group painted a colorful map of the United States on the other side of the facility from the playground. The map is a kind of signature, Ott says, as the Fort Yuma Rotary has painted a U.S. map on an empty concrete space at every school where they have completed a construction project.
"I think the map adds a really fun, vibrant educational visual for the school," said Fort Yuma Rotarian Kimberly Sawyer as she worked on painting the map at James B. Rolle Elementary.
Bruce Jensen, another Fort Yuma Rotarian who worked alongside Sawyer on Saturday in painting the map, says that since geography is often lifted from school's curriculum these days, the map serves to supplement that area for today's youth. Each state on the map is also left unlabeled, Jensen said, so that the map engenders some questioning and so that the kids can learn.
"This is a tremendous donation from the Fort Yuma Rotary," Ott said. "We never could have gotten this without their volunteering and all of their fundraising. I just wish to remind people that when you see a rotary needing support, donate or volunteer because the money is going to our community. They built many playgrounds and they make a lot of donations so when somebody donates to a Rotary project they are supporting our community."
"This project has over exceeded anything I had even dreamed that it could be," Ott added. "It really went above and beyond what we needed."
See video here: https://youtu.be/rWbcKjJzPUE