PTO Today

Can you smell the fresh air and hear the kids laughing? Our stories this week highlight some great outdoor events being held around the country.

The Williamston, Mich., school district, helped along by parent volunteers, held a Walk- to-School day last week and plans to create “Walking Wednesdays’’ through the month of May. A parent volunteer reported the kids were “having a blast’’ and “full of energy’’ as they walked and socialized with friends. These events are part of a Safe Routes 2 School program the district launched this year with a $248,000 grant. The district is also doing walking school buses, participating in the National Bike to School Day on May 9, and holding a “Caught Being Safe’’ Day where students and parents are rewarded for good driving.

Who knew mulch could mean so much! The Mount Vernon High School in Alexandria, Va., did.  It just completed its 8^th annual springtime mulch sale and brought in $20,000! Run by the Combined Parent Council at MVHS, the mulch sale is used to fund the seniors’ all-night graduation party. The group sold over 9,000 bags of mulch!

The PTA at the John F. Kennedy Elementary School in Port Chester, New York recently held its 5^th annual walk-a-thon this month and had 500 participants. The PTA gave cash prizes to three students who raised the most money through pledges. The group also offered a pizza party to the class that brought in the most money and an ice cream party for the class that had the most participants.

The John W. Decas Elementary School in Wareham, Mass., has a beautiful new $30,000 playground, thanks to a dedicated playground committee and many months of fundraising, (spaghetti suppers, Hat Days) and seeking donations. The committee brought in a crew of volunteers who managed to assemble the entire thing (including pouring concrete!) and put down child-safe mulch in one day. Job well done!

Does your school have a playground? Did you have one installed a few years back? Has anyone given it any thought or review in the past couple of years?

If you’re thinking of adding a playground or replacing an existing playground, our Playground Yellow Pages are a great place to start your research.

But if you have a relatively OK playground, I hope your group will still take the time to give it a spring review. Maintenance and upkeep and upgrades are a frequently overlooked part of making sure your kids have a great, safe place to play. You can make your playground last far longer — and ensure that your kids have a better environment for those key play times — with budgeted maintenance or even a selected upgrade or two, as opposed to a full-blown new build.

What should you be looking for when checking the playground? Check out these links to start:

How To Inspect Your Playground

National Program for Playground Safety

We love, love, love school playgrounds. And we love them more when they’re safe and tons of fun for the kids. Taking the time for an annual spring playground checkup is well worth the effort.

As the weather starts warming up, make sure your playground is safe for students with this simple checklist.

1. Measure the fill around the equipment. It should be at least 12 inches deep. Clean out trash and animal droppings. Examine rubber mats for curls and wooden borders for splinters.
2. Examine the play structure for cracks and breakage. Check for rust spots or splinters. Run your hand over plastic parts—they shouldn’t have any imperfections. Shake stairs to make sure they are still sturdy.
3. Examine bolts and nails to make sure they’re still tight and not protruding. You should never be able to turn bolts with your fingers.
4. Look for missing caps or plugs (common on ladders and climbers). Examine hooks for wear.
5. Look for wear in gears and other moving parts. Oil as needed.
6. Make sure seesaw handles are secure and bumpers are in place to cushion the landing.
7. Wash equipment with soap and water as needed. Never use bleach.

Read “How To Inspect Your Playground” for more details, and find lots more tips and ideas on the School Playgrounds resources page.

For those of you who have been involved with a playground fundraising effort, you know that it’s an ambitious and rewarding project. Just look at the faces of the children at a new playground grand opening and all your efforts are instantly rewarded.

The tenacity of the elementary school PTA featured in this recent article is admirable. To date they have raised 37K and secured matching grant funding.But what makes it even better is that they are holding a barbecue and silent auction to raise even more money. Why? To replace the gravel on the playground with compressed wood chips — a wheelchair-friendly product that will let their special-needs preschoolers enjoy the playground. That’s going to be one awesome playground.

Always love it when a PTO project gets completed successfully.   In this case — thanks to the PTO — this school backyard no longer looks directly into an active cemetary.

Love it even more when a Lowe’s Toolbox for Education grant is a big part of the reason why the project worked.. 

Nice.

I honestly don’t think Lowe’s support of parent involvement and of PTOs and PTAs gets near enough credit.  These guys really walk the walk when it comes to supporting schools in the communities where they do business.  I may be missing a program, but I’m fairly certain that the Lowe’s Toolbox for Education program is by far the largest and most generous grant program focused primarily on school PTOs and PTAs in the whole country.

Thanks Lowe’s!

The 2nd cycle of the 2008-09 school year was just completed.  The totals — more than $4,000,000 shared with more than 900 local parent groups across the country.  And that’s just this year.  The Toolbox program is now well over $10 million in total.  Double thanks, Lowe’s!

PTO Today is proud of the modest role we play as the communications and administrative team behind the scenes of Toolbox. None of this would happen without the generosity of the Lowe’s Charitable & Educational Foundation. Hundreds of playgrounds, hundreds of school grounds upgrades, hundreds of school signs, and innumerable creative building projects that don’t fit squarely in a common category (but which all are making schools better places…) — awesome.

Let’s Build Something Together is the Lowe’s tag line.  With this program, they’re really making that a reality.  Can your group gear up now to get involved next year?  

Congrats to this PTA mom from Maryland who’s up for a statewide parent involvement honor.  Her achievement?  Securing a $300,000 grant for a new handicapped-accessible playground for her school.  Sounds like it’s going to be amazing.

Local PTO, principal and a local church group looking for a project team up in a big way to transform a school. Very cool. We’re talking, painting, murals, moving fences, landscaping — the whole enchilada. Great casue. Great effort.

Wow, this is really the week for honoring PTOs. First it was the school throwing the nice party for its PTO. And now Ellen Degeneres is giving away brand new playgrounds to two deserving groups.

Side note: looks like our friends at Playworld Systems were heavily involved in this program with Ellen. That new NEOS playground system of theirs looks cool.

Yup, turtle races. Love the creativity of these PTOers in Massachusetts, who are planning a ton of activities centered on a man-made river (in the schoolyard) with plastic turtles floating downstream. The article contains really good detail on the build-up and plans for the turtle race event, which is a big fundraiser for a new playground project. Nice job.

Story is a great example of the “doing fewer things but doing those things better” philosophy that we’ve written about in the magazine for years. This is the kind of event that — done well — can change the reputation of a PTO for the better.