School playground meets special needs

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- This kind of stuff never happened when there was nothing but blacktop here.

"Hey! Devin wants to go down the slide!" shouts Crystal Shakur, a physical therapist assistant at Kansas City's Delano School.

The boy uses his arms and fists to worm his tiny body into position at the top of the blue slide -- atop a long-awaited playset at this school for children with severe disabilities.

Shakur, kneeling behind him on the padded catwalk, hangs on while another teacher gets ready to receive the boy down below -- then she lets him go, cheering.

"All right, Devin!"

This is not a physical therapy session, Shakur said, even though Devin Pulce is working on his muscles and his motor skills as he would back inside in a sanitized school room.

He's out in the sunshine. Laughing.

"This is play."

Three years had passed since that first financial gift arrived through the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation. It was a check for some $42,000 from the Crummett Family Foundation.

It turned out the school had a regular donor that wanted to remain behind the scenes -- a donor that cared for Delano, its mission and its children, principal Jennifer Malone said.

Malone knew what she thought the school should do with the gift. Her staff, without any prompting, agreed.

"A playground!" she remembers a teacher shouting at a staff meeting.

Extraordinary playground

But this had to be an extraordinary playground.

It needed to accommodate children safely with multiple special needs. It had to be the playground that Delano's children deserved.

It had to completely banish the experience of the old blacktop, with the cracks and grass growing through it, and the low-hanging electrical wires stretched above it.

That blacktop was hardly good for anything but kickball or chasing bubbles, said librarian and media specialist Karen Shelton. And it offered nothing for the many children at the school who can't run or even walk.

"We had no recess program," Shelton said.

One problem: The new playground was going to cost a whole lot more than $42,000.

Months later, the Crummett Foundation delivered another donation, and the gifts on hand to fund the playground had reached about $100,000. That could cover most of the cost of the equipment. The Kansas City School Board approved matching funds to cover the costs of preparing the site.

Many of Delano's children hadn't had chances to play on such a playground before. Other park playgrounds were inaccessible to them, or were not safe enough.

Play as education

They were missing out on the important opportunities to socialize in free play. They didn't have the same chances to stretch their physical aspirations by watching the feats of other children.

"I can do it," 5-year-old Sonya Caufield said as she began to follow a couple of schoolmates up one of the playset's ladders.

The girl, with braces on her legs, explored the idea, then changed her mind this time. But then she was off toward another path to access the catwalk.

"C'mon!" she said, beckoning company as she went. "C'mon! Play with me!"

Meanwhile, teacher Floydetta Baker-Young watched 7-year-old Mohamad Mohamad scale vertical steps to the top platform, cheering him on the way.

"He's never done that before," Baker-Young said. "They wouldn't get this otherwise."

Many staff members shared similar stories -- of the 12-year-old girl who went down a slide for the first time with an adult going alongside her.

Or the 5-year-old boy who finds his peace in the swings, relaxing and smiling.

Or the 6-year-old who resists efforts to get him to stand during therapy, but who wants to stand while on the playground, who loves it.

The playground is more than the kind of recreation that Delano children crave as much as any children, Malone said. Education teams are incorporating the playground into individual education plan goals for their students.

"Every morning I come in I see it," Malone said. "And I am amazed. I'm so pleased. I'm overwhelmed. This is an extension of our school."

After a half-hour or so, it was time to go inside. Teachers and aides rounded the children up.

Some skipped inside. Some walked. Some went with crutches. Some in wheelchairs.

All of them, though, shone with the flushed, happy faces of children who had just had recess.