Langdon competing nationally to raise funds for playground

Times Reporter

 

Parents of students in Langdon joined together a few years ago and started looking at ways to improve the playground at the school for the kids. They have finished segment one of three and have entered the AVIVA Community Fund competition to try to win funding for segment two. 

“Segment one was basically the first wheelchair accessible playground in the entire municipal district of Rockyview,” said Shelagh Phelps, a member of the parent parks committee. The grand opening for segment one was on Sept. 24. Play valley was another part of segment one which was completed there was a swale to redirect water off the playground and there are 2,000 handprints and footprints on it.  

The committee has been around for three years and for the first year to year and a half they were already planning what they would like to do for the school. There are approximately 800 children attending the school and the original playground was suited for 45 kids, but all for older kids. 

“This playground that we put in was for 60 kids, it’s geared towards kindergarten and Grade 1. Kids in wheelchairs and walkers and all that kind of stuff can go on it,” said Phelps. 

“Basically what we did was we took the top three priorities and made each of those a part of a segment and then we partnered things that were not as high priority with things that are high priority things because we wanted to get them done,” said Phelps. 

They received approximately  $165,000 in grants for the first segment. The committee had done some fundraising but Phelps said it was more to raise awareness about the project within the community.

Segment two is worth about $450,000 and it’s to build a playground for 200 children basically hitting the rest of the age groups. There will still be accessibility for wheelchairs and walkers and right now the plan is the ground will be rubber. Part of segment two is to also to connect the school pathway to the community pathway. The kids were a big part in deciding the design of the playground.

“That playground was designed by the kids. When we trying to decide what to build we got quotes from three different vendors with three different designs and we had the kids vote on the different designs.

All of the designs were within a couple of votes of each other, so the kids were asked what they liked and didn’t like about the playground 

 After the kids voted they asked the vendors if they could recreate their design to meet the kids criteria and only one was able to accommodate.  Last year a few committee members had seen a commercial about the AVIVA competition. They had entered their idea into round three of the competition and Phelps said because they did not fully know what to do as a part of the competition at that point, they did not win. 

“Last year we were around the 32 to 33 place in our category,” said Phelps. 

There are three categories, one is small for projects under $25,000, then there is a medium category, which is from $25,000 to $100,000, and then large is $100,000 to $500,000. There are three rounds of voting and the top 30 ideas from each round are taken and promote them to a semi-final round. Anyone across Canada can enter an idea into the competition and anybody can vote on the ideas. 

“We need more people voting for us. We’ve got right now, 965 supporters and we need at least 2,000,” said Phelps. 

The way the competition works is everyone is allowed to vote 10 times and they can only vote once per idea per day and Phelps said they would like to see each person to use their 10 votes on their project. 

“In our group in the semi-finals there will be 30 ideas and then whoever is in the top 10 large ideas will move to the judging round,” said Phelps. 

“Our goal is to be the number 1 large idea because we that think we’ll have a higher chance of winning what it is that we want if we’re in the number 1 spot then in the number 10 spot.”

Each idea has to be ready to implement by Dec. 31 of 2011, they are not going to give someone money if they cant build within that time frame. They will be ready to start in May and would only wait until then due to school regulation, which states they can’t do construction unless it is between May 1 and Sept. 30.

Voting begins for the semi-final round begins on Dec. 2. To see what the committee has proposed and to vote on the idea go to avivacommunityfund.org and type Langdon into search ideas.