School Turns to Residents to Help Build Playground : Ventura: A New York architect will get children’s input today. Effort will depend on volunteers’ work.

Eager for a new playground but lacking the money, a Ventura elementary school is enlisting the help of hundreds of residents and local businesses to build a play area from scratch.

Blanche Reynolds School has hired a New York architectural firm nationally known for designing community playgrounds to come to the school today to begin work on the project, which will be modeled after a playground in Alameda Park in Santa Barbara and about 900 similar play areas around the world.

The plan is, organizers said, that children help design the playground and then adults from the community build it.

But their goal will be to build it in only five days.

“It’s like an old-fashioned barn-raising where everyone comes out, the community comes out and creates something in five days,” said Blanche Reynolds teacher Lisa Hall. “Our idea is to bring back the community into the school system.”

Although the playground will be on school property, next to Blanche Reynolds’ existing playground, it will be open to the public after school and on weekends. Organizers hope to build it this fall.

In Santa Barbara, more than 4,000 volunteers from all over the city worked from 7 in the morning to 10 at night for five days last November to build the 10,000-square-foot playground in Alameda Park.

A dense wooden maze of bridges, tunnels, slides and swings, the Santa Barbara playground was designed by the same architectural firm of Robert S. Leathers and Associates from Ithaca, N.Y., that will draw up the plans for Blanche Reynolds.

The Leathers firm has also designed about 900 similar, community-built play areas in cities across the nation and in Canada, Australia and Israel.

Construction of the Santa Barbara playground, sponsored by the local chamber of commerce, cost about $320,000 in donated lumber, nails and other materials, and $180,000 in cash for the architect’s fee and additional supplies, which was also raised by the community.

But organizers at Blanche Reynolds School said they expect their project to cost about half that--or $250,000--because it will be less elaborate. They will get an estimate on the cost after the architectural plans are drawn up this week.

This morning, architect Dan Bergevin will visit every class at Blanche Reynolds to get children’s ideas for the project. He will spend this afternoon drawing up plans for the playground and will then meet with the community at 7:30 p.m. tonight.

Although every playground designed by the Leathers firm has essentially the same features--wooden slides, swings and walkways--the architects get ideas from children to add unique details and to determine what to put where.

“They may say, ‘We want a rocket ship and then we want a bridge that goes over to a castle,’ ” said Barry Segal, a vice president for the architectural firm.

Mentally stimulating and physically challenging, playgrounds designed by the Leathers group provide an outlet for children that is sorely needed at Blanche Reynolds, organizers said.

The school’s existing playground is a small assortment of rusty, decades-old jungle gyms, monkey bars and slides planted in black rubber mats on a gravel lot next to the soccer field.

Many of the kindergarten-through-sixth-grade students at the school find the playground so uninteresting they choose to stay inside at recess, teachers said.

“It gets really, really boring,” fifth-grader Lauren McPhun said.

“There’s not enough stuff,” fifth-grader Chelsea Rasmussen added.

Knowing the cash-strapped Ventura Unified School District lacks the funds to pay for a new playground, teachers and parents at Blanche Reynolds said they decided to build a new play area themselves after they visited the playground in Santa Barbara.

“Every parent that’s ever been up there says, ‘Why don’t we have this in Ventura?’ ” said Lori Z, whose 5-year-old son Satch Herrmann is in kindergarten at the school.

Organizers estimate they will need about 1,500 volunteers to build the playground. And so far they have only about 50 volunteers, who have raised just $2,500, enough to cover a small initial fee and travel expenses for the architect.

But Segal said nearly all communities that have launched such playground projects have completed them.

Once built, the only maintenance required for the playgrounds is resealing the wood once or twice each year to protect against splintering and weather damage. Even with this care, however, the playgrounds deteriorate and have to be torn down after 20 to 30 years, Segal said.

Blanche Reynolds teachers and parents said they believe the process of generating community support for the playground will have its own benefits.

By helping to build the playground, Ventura residents will “become more supportive and involved” with their children, Lori Z said. “It means the community cares about what happens to their kids.”

FYI

Ventura residents will have the opportunity to see the design for the playground and learn more about the project at a community meeting with the architect at 7:30 tonight at the Blanche Reynolds School auditorium, 450 Valmore Ave. To help build the playground or help with fund raising, call the school at 641-5405.