Background
About Parkview
Parkview Center School is a district-wide, Pre-K to 8th grade school located in Roseville, MN. Parkview serves a large and diverse student population. Of the 764 students, 54% are non-white, 15% are English Language Learners, and 36% qualify for Free or Reduced Priced Lunch.
Parkview is also home to 160 students with disabilities. This includes students in district programs for children with the most significant disabilities: the STAR program for children with Developmental Cognitive Disabilities and the BEAM program for children with Emotional Behavioral Disorders. Overall, there are 43 Parkview students who have physical disabilities/mobility impairments, and over 40 who have social, emotional or sensory disabilities.
Parkview’s Current Playground
Use
Parkview’s current playground encompasses a large area to the side of the building, and includes a variety of play spaces, including play structures, swings, a sandbox, grassy fields and a GaGa Ball Pit.
Parkview’s playground is used daily throughout the school year and in the summer by Parkview’s school-age childcare program; and is open to the public during non-school hours. In addition to daily student use, the playground is a community gathering space during warmer months. The Parent Teacher Student Association (PTSA) hosts an Ice Cream Social in the fall and Family Fun Night in the spring, which are open to all students, families/caregivers, teachers and staff.
Age and Condition
Parkview’s play structures are 26 years old and are in need of replacement. While Roseville School District maintains existing playgrounds, funding new structures is up to each school. As playground equipment nears the end of its expected life, repairs are shifting from minor to significant, both in scope and price, and causing safety concerns. For example, this fall a large section at the highest point of the play structure was roped off for weeks due to safety concerns while the school awaited replacement decking.
Accessibility and Playability for Children with Disabilities
Beyond the playground age, the playground design is problematic, especially for Parkview’s significant population of students with physical disabilities. While many of the play areas include features that technically meet minimum design standards for users with disabilities, in practice there are very few areas where children with disabilities are able to play. For some students this means that they spend their time outside watching their friends play without them, waiting to use the two adaptive swings which are the only structures accessible to them, or waiting for their turn to have staff help them get around the space.
A formal Accessibility Review of the space, observations of recess, interviews with staff and surveys of students and families have identified some of the major issues as:
● Pathways: There currently do not exist accessible pathways to reach any of the play structures. Existing pathways exceed the maximum 5% grade required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in many places and are in generally poor repair.
● Access Points: Most of the play areas are surrounded by a raised wooden playground border, with no access point for wheelchairs or other mobility aids.
● Space: While the size of the outdoor space is in many ways an asset, it presents challenges for students with physical disabilities. Simply traversing the space is extremely time consuming, and exhausting for some students, leaving little time and energy for play.
● Independence: Given the lack of accessibility, staff must constantly assist students around the space, meaning that individual students spend a large portion of their outdoor time simply waiting for a turn for assistance.
● Surfacing: The majority of play areas have wood fiber (chips) as the ground surfacing. While this is technically an ADA compliant material, in practice it presents significant challenges for students with physical disabilities. Moving wheelchairs over wood chips is difficult, requiring staff assistance. For students who use other mobility aids like gait trainers, the wood fiber compresses under the device and the surrounding wood fiber then creates a tripping hazard.
Importance of Play
There is extensive research that demonstrates that play supports all children’s social and emotional development, and is an important part of how children learn to share, work together, resolve conflicts, manage stress, practice empathy, and learn other social and emotional skills. Physical play also supports children’s physical health and wellbeing.1-3
For children with disabilities, play can also have other important impacts, like improving self-confidence, and providing opportunities for independence. Play can also directly impact disability. For example, children with social, emotional or behavioral disabilities demonstrate improvements in sociability, classroom functioning, executive function and mood following physical play. For children with autism, outdoor play can be a critical opportunity to improve sensory integration skills.2, 4-5
While play is essential for children with and without disabilities, children with disabilities can experience many barriers to play. School-based physical activity levels are substantially lower for children with disabilities, and playground designs themselves often exclude children with disabilities from playing. Inaccessible play spaces not only physically exclude children with disabilities, they reinforce feelings of isolation and the sense among children with and without disabilities that kids with disabilities are “different.”4, 6-7
Proposed Project
Parkview’s Leadership in partnership with the Parent Teacher Student Association are in the planning stages of a multi-phase project to replace the current playground with an inclusively designed play space at the school. Our goal is to create a new outdoor play space that has abundant opportunities for children of all types of abilities to play together.
Phase A - Part 1: To be completed Fall 2025: install inclusive whirl, dome climber, bench, monkey bars, spinner, Pour in Place (PIP), and ADA compliant pathway from school to playground.
Phase A - Part 2: Replace existing main playground structure (with an inclusive play space; improve playground pathways.
Goals: Create an accessible, inclusive play space located in the current primary play area and improve the pathways from the building to play area. This will help centralize a set of playground features that have high play value for students with and without disabilities and create pathways for access. The play area will include a variety of free-standing equipment, ramped structure, pour-in-place surfacing, and will prioritize features that are optimally accessible for students living with physical disabilities.
Phase B: Expand and improve existing swing bay and add musical elements
Goal: Replace the existing, inaccessible swing bay with a larger, inclusive bay and add musical play elements along pathways.
Phase C: Create accessible pathways from parking lot to playground
Goal: Create an ADA compliant pathway from the parking lot to the playground to simplify classroom access to the outdoor space, address issues of exclusion of families from outdoor community events and to enable broad community access to the play area.
References
- Ginsburg, R. (2007). The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds. Pediatrics (2007) 119 (1): 182–191.
- Yogman, M., Garner, A., Hutchinson, J., et al. (2018). The power of play: A pediatric role in enhancing development in young children. Pediatrics, 142(3).
- Daubert, E. N., Ramani, G. B., & Rubin, K. H. (2018). Play-Based Learning and Social Development (pp. 1-5).
- Jeanes, R. & Magee, J. (2012). ‘Can we play on the swings and roundabouts?’: creating inclusive play spaces for disabled young people and their families. Leisure Studies, 31, 2.
- Bowling, A., et al. (2022). Presenting a New Framework to Improve Engagement in Physical Activity Programs for Children and Adolescents With Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Disabilities. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13.
- McNamara, L. et al. (2018). Recess and children with disabilities: A mixed-methods pilot study, Disability and Health Journal, Volume 11, Issue 4, 637-643.
- Brown DMY, et al. (2021). A Scoping Review of Evidence-Informed Recommendations for Designing Inclusive Playgrounds. Front. Rehabilit. Sci. 2:664595
