Posted on: Monday, November 5, 2001

Island Voices
Playground experience essential for kids

By Richard Johnson
Kailua resident

I was intrigued by two recent Advertiser articles that discussed the dismantling of playground spaces for children at several different Windward O'ahu public schools.

I helped construct one of the playgrounds, at 'Aikahi Elementary School, and I share close personal and professional ties with the designer of these particular playgrounds, the late Jimi Jolley.

In defense of the importance of play in the lives of children and adults, I want to borrow and build on the closing line of one of these articles. School officials put table salt in the tires and covered it with orange fencing and sprayed the areas with pyrethrins to help keep mosquitoes from breeding.

As an advocate for play, I want to help keep complacency from breeding in the way we respond to play here in Hawai'i. Several years ago, most Department of Education playgrounds were closed as they were deemed unsafe for children. In one of the above-mentioned articles, a school principal shares that the wait can be up to two years after a school applies for a playground.

Add the two years since that tape first went up and we have a minimum of four years response time before adequate play structures are available for elementary-aged children.

In the other article, schools admit new equipment could take anywhere from three months to two years to obtain and install. This familiar time-lag is evident with the multi-year postponement of the construction of skateboard parks in Kailua. And yet with the so-called threat of dengue fever, these same schools can rid themselves of unwanted, outdated play equipment over the course of four hours on a Monday afternoon.

Would we tolerate these same lengthy delays for any other academic curriculum projects or standards-based education initiatives in our DOE? Our inactions are shameful indeed as we continue to let play experiences slip away from the lives of children.

In fact, in our zest to make our kids smarter, new literacy initiatives in the state are erasing playtime (i.e., recess) from many schools here and around the country.

The work of play advocates over the past several hundred years and the mounds of child-study research in the past 50 years note the critical importance of play in the development of humankind.