VENTURA : Board OKs Plan for New Playground

The Ventura school board Tuesday approved a plan that will provide Blanche Reynolds School with an elaborate new playground that the community will build by hand.

With the Ventura Unified School District’s support, organizers for the playground said all they have to do is raise $60,000 before the scheduled start of construction Nov. 2.

Designed by the same architects who planned the playground at Alameda Park in Santa Barbara, the play-lot project at Blanche Reynolds is being financed entirely by the community.

Teachers and parents at the elementary school on Valmore Avenue launched a fund-raising drive in the spring after realizing that the financially strapped school district would be unable to help replace their school’s rusty metal slides and jungle gyms.

So far the group has raised about $20,000 in cash and $20,000 in construction materials, Blanche Reynolds teacher Lisa Hall said.

But an additional $60,000 in cash is needed to be able to build the 10,000-square-foot play lot on the targeted construction dates of Nov. 2 to 6, she said.

Parents, teachers and other community residents have all committed to help build the project. They will use plans drawn up by the Ithaca, N.Y.-based architectural firm of Robert S. Leathers and Associates, which has designed hundreds of community-built play areas around the nation.

“We see it as a barn-raising, as a community-building effort,” teacher Roni Adams told the school board Tuesday.

Dubbed the Rainbow Bridge project, the playground will have as its theme a Chumash legend that says the Chumash used a rainbow as a bridge when they crossed from the Channel Islands to settle in Ventura.

Made of wood and a wood-like recycled plastic material, the play lot will feature life-sized sculptured dolphins for children to play on, rubber bridges, a tire swing and seven slides.