Disabled, Able-Bodied Share Park : Ventura: The new playground officially opens. It has equipment that gives the two groups a chance to interact.

Leaning forward in her wheelchair, Heather McPherson plunged her hands into the sand that two Ventura park workers were shoveling into a plastic dome-shaped sandbox raised off the ground for easy access.

“She loves the sand table,” said Sandra McPherson of Ventura, the 7-year-old’s mother. “She gets filthy, but it’s pretty fun.”

Heather, who has cerebral palsy, was one of about 40 children with special needs or physical disabilities who attended the official opening Thursday of a new playground in Camino Real Park, where handicapped and able-bodied children can play side by side.

“What’s neat about this is it’s not just for handicapped kids,” Sandra McPherson said.

The city of Ventura opened the playground, one of two such areas in the park, a week before the Americans With Disabilities Act takes effect. The other playground opened two months ago, and a third will open soon in West Park.

The federal measure gives civil rights protection to individuals with disabilities, and was cited by Mayor Greg Carson in the dedication ceremony as an impetus for building the facility.

But, as one physical therapist pointed out, not all equipment in the playground is accessible to wheelchair-bound children. Those with disabilities can use only one of the three slides without assistance, she said.

The therapist, who declined to be identified, praised the city for building the $36,000 playground.

“I think it’s a great start, but there’s lots of room for improvement,” she said.

Greg Gilmer, park operations manager for the Ventura Department of Parks and Recreation, acknowledged that not all of the equipment can be used by children in wheelchairs. But he said that was not the city’s intent.

Integration and interaction are the key concepts, he said, referring to the opportunity for disabled and able-bodied children to play together. If all the equipment was geared just toward the physically handicapped children, he said, the able-bodied children would not be challenged.

The playground floor is covered with rubber that looks like gravel and will cushion a fall of up to six feet. Wheelchairs can roll over it with ease, allowing children to go from the sand table to the yellow plastic tick-tack-toe game and on to the blue monkey bars.

Vandals recently poured gasoline onto and torched the rubber ground covering at the other new playground in Camino Real Park, which Gilmer said cost the city about $800 to repair.

The monkey bars help build upper body strength, a feature that recreation coordinator Renee Gomez said special education teachers recommend highly for physically disabled children.

Charlotte Underwood of Camarillo pointed to her 4-year-old son, James, slowly creeping toward the sandbox with his walker.

“He’s on his way back; he likes it,” she said. James soon reached the sand, abandoned his walker and began grabbing handfuls of sand.

Underwood said her son loves the monkey bars. “He’s a monkey,” she said. “He loves to climb.”

James, she said, has a neuromuscular disease that doctors believe will eventually go away so that he will be able to walk on his own. But in the meantime, she said, she will drive her son to this or any other therapeutic facility she can find.

“You’ll go anyplace when it’s your child,” she said.

The Conejo Recreation and Park District has five playgrounds in Thousand Oaks with equipment similar to that at the Ventura playground, and is planning to install more, a district official said.

The Ventura Department of Parks and Recreation has asked the City Council to approve an allocation of $255,000 over the next two years for similar equipment to be installed in the city’s 13 other parks, Gilmer said.

FYI

The entrance to Camino Real Park in Ventura is at Varsity Street and Dean Drive, which is off Mills Road. Follow the signs.