One of Culver City’s oldest parks is set to be the beneficiary of new technology designed to make park equipment inclusive for all children.
The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously on March 5 to award $2 million to eight cities, including Culver City, for municipal park improvement projects. The $250,000 for Culver City will go towards the installation of what is called universally accessible playground equipment for physically challenged children.
“The improvements would be to purchase and install ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant play structure at the (Syd Kronenthal) Park,” explained Culver City Parks Recreation and Community Services Director Daniel Hernandez. “This is one of our older structures that has been slated for replacement, but we have lacked the funding to do so.”
These playgrounds typically have specially designed equipment with an emphasis on sensory features. For example, the Everychild Foundation Universally Accessible Playground at Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital has brightly colored slides, swings and bridges for children of all ages that can also accommodate those who use wheelchairs and leg braces.
“We’re delighted that these park enhancements are coming,” Scott Bowling, the president and CEO of The Exceptional Children’s Foundation, a Culver City nonprofit organization dedicated to serving children and adults with developmental and other disabilities. “For so many physically and developmentally challenged children, this can be a great experience because many of them don’t even have backyard were they can play.”
The park enhancement initiative is called the Syd Kronenthal Park Playground Rehabilitation Project, named after one of Culver City’s best known Parks and Recreation directors.
Asked why Kronenthal Park was chosen for the enhancements, Hernandez responded, “(It has) some of our oldest equipment and least accessible play structures in the city.”
Universally accessible playground equipment has been placed in various parks across Los Angeles, including in nearby Del Rey. Shane’s Inspiration, an organization that advocates on behalf of disabled children by creating universally accessible playgrounds to integrate children of all abilities, worked with Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl and Los Angeles Recreation and Parks officials to bring the new play area to Glen Alla Park in 2010.
“True inclusion really happens on the playground,” said Shane’s Inspiration Founder and CEO Tiffany Harris after the Del Rey event. “Children of a young age tend to be very inquisitive and we find that we can get them together in a play environment.”
“All kids should have the opportunity to have fun, and all kids should be able to do it with each other,” said Rosendahl, who represents Del Rey.
“For young people to meet others with special needs or challenges sets in each person’s soul a relationship that only that can ( be positive) and to see a kid with a disability and a kid without a disability smiling and laughing with each other is the ultimate joy of connecting us all and giving us all what we should have.”
Bowling said playing in parks and in playgrounds can be a rite of passage of sorts during childhood. “For many of the students that we serve, this can be essential in their development and enhance their sensory skills,” he said.
The project will be exempt from the California Environmental Protection Act, known as CEQA. The 1970 statewide landmark statute is the basis for environmental law and policy to protect environmental quality in California.
Hernandez said Parks and Recreation officials anticipate the installation of the universally accessible playground equipment will be completed by the fall.