Pomelo Says Bye-Bye to Playground Perils Canoga Park

Pomelo Drive Elementary School officials and parents celebrated the reopening Friday of the newly refurbished playground, marking the culmination of an effort to keep students safer from scrapes and scars while at play.

At the ceremony, Principal Marcee Seegan dubbed the old playground “the perils of Pomelo.” It was dotted with potholes, sinkholes and loose gravel that made walking, let alone running, a dangerous ordeal.

Countless skinned knees and arms and a broken ankle later, parents and administrators had had enough. Last year they began a crusade to fix the playground, raising money and urging the Los Angeles Unified School District to allocate some of its deferred maintenance funds to the project.

After seeing the dire condition of the playground, the school board gave its approval for the $225,000 repair, which was done over the summer.

At Friday’s ceremony, board member Mark Slavkin told students, parents and teachers that their tenacity and dedication to the project helped make it a reality. “Sometimes it takes people to get a little angry and raising their voices to get things done,” he said.

The students, however, were just glad to be able to again play kickball, basketball and handball without fear of slipping on loose gravel.

The school was one of a few in the district that was built with macadam--small broken stones sometimes used with asphalt--which caused the ground to crumble rapidly, exposing the pebbles underneath, Seegan said.

Students were eager to tell stories of one classmate or another who was hurt in a fall. They were happy to show the scars on their knees as proof of their bravery in the face of potholes. But Friday, students said they much preferred falling on smooth asphalt.

“This is better,” said fifth-grader Shawn Shachar. “When I fell yesterday, I didn’t get rocks in my leg. It was just a little scrape.”