Children tell what they want to have in new Wildcat Park

By BENNETT HALL
Gazette-Times business editor

Close your eyes and imagine your perfect playground. What do you see?

Here are some of the answers Lindsey Koenig’s kindergartners gave Tuesday morning at a brainstorming session for the new Wildcat Park:

“A slide that goes twirling down.”

“One of those things that has a net on the bottom.”

“A big tower that goes as tall as a building.”

“A slide that has a bump on it.”

“A trampoline.”

“A fireman’s pole.”

“A castle.”

“A slide that goes underground.”

“Swings that go super-duper high.”

“A boingy rope that you bounce on.”

Got all that? Dennis Will does.

A playground designer with Leathers & Associates of New York, Will spent Tuesday morning listening to a slew of suggestions from students at Wilson Elementary School.

Much of the afternoon was devoted to drafting a rough sketch of the new park that will replace the beloved community playground at Wilson, which was torn down this fall because of safety concerns.

The evening was set aside for a celebration of the reconstruction effort in the gym, complete with refreshments, a design preview and songs performed by the kids (“Hop on a train and take a ride, build a park with Wildcat pride!”).

From there it’s back to New York to flesh out the preliminary drawings and send them back to Corvallis, where the Wildcat Park Steering Committee will review the preliminary design with school district and city parks officials.

“Within two weeks we’ll have that back to the committee with a materials list,” said Will, who estimates he’s been through this kind of community design process “somewhere between three and four hundred times — I’ve lost count.”

It will cost an estimated $250,000 to design and build a replacement playground. The Corvallis School District has set aside $100,000 left over from the 2002 facilities improvement bond for the project, but the rest will be raised through cash and in-kind donations.

In addition to gathering ideas for the replacement playground Tuesday, Will was cultivating allies in the campaign to attract volunteers. It will take hundreds, organizers say, to construct the new park, and Will primed the kids to become enthusiastic labor recruiters.

After collecting a fresh round of play equipment suggestions from Marta McCracken and Patti White’s first-graders, Will asked the students who they could get to build their new park.

“My dad,” answered one child. “He’s strong, and he can build big things.”

Another, thinking of the big picture, offered a more ambitious suggestion: “We could ask aunts and uncles and moms and dads and some families,” she said, “and we could ask some people in the school to help also.”

Finally, Will asked the children how long they thought it would take to build the playground of their dreams.

“A hundred years?”

Not quite.

“Sixteen weeks?”

Getting warmer.

“Five days?”

Yep — five days. While the planning will take a few more months, he told them, the work will go quickly once it gets started.

Leathers & Associates used a similar process to create the original Wildcat Park on the Wilson Elementary grounds in 1989. That, too, was a communitywide volunteer effort.

Hoping to have a replacement playground built by the end of this school year, the Wildcat Park Steering Committee has already begun signing up volunteers, ringing up contributions and lining up donations of construction materials.

The committee is aiming for a construction date of late May or early June.

ON THE NET:

For more information about Wildcat Park, see www.newwildcatpark.org.

Bennett Hall is the business editor for the Gazette-Times. He can be reached at 758-9529 or bennett.hall@lee.net.