This Playground Makes Sense

What’s taken shape here on a Santa Ana school playground is nothing more than play equipment--painted in primary colors and forged into something the teachers call the “space station”--and a concrete sidewalk that winds through the grass.

But to children who have never seen anything at all, it is a sliver of freedom in a world draped in darkness.

A few years ago, when Michael Cao, now 6, was first brought to the Blind Children’s Learning Center in Santa Ana, he spent his days rocking back and forth in silence with his hands on his head, so withdrawn that people thought he’d never change.

Today, he is still reserved, but he plunks on the piano keyboard, feels his way around and plays with other children as he never did before. Folks say it was the playground that did it.

Michael, who with 10 other children graduated last week from the learning center into kindergarten, is one of the few who have used the new playground, which was built in June and designed specifically for blind kids.

The textured sidewalks, the equipment embossed with large numbers and the wind chimes help orient the children. The idea is for these kids, who often become emotionally withdrawn without special help, to run and play on their own, sometimes stumbling and falling down as they do.

Organizers and parents say the playground, if nothing else, helps the children learn how to play with other blind kids and helps them break out of their solitude before it is too late.

Greg and Patty Stewart say the playground has taught their 5-year-old son, Mark, how to climb and get around obstacles. Last week Mark went rock climbing with some of the other students.

“I never would have thought to take him rock climbing,” Patty Stewart said.

About 50 parents, students and teachers gathered Thursday for a small ceremony. The children wore purple graduation gowns and necklaces of yellow-and-purple flowers and sang the “Rainbow Connection,” the song that Kermit the Frog made popular in a Muppet movie.

It was the first graduating class of the 35-year-old school to have used the new playground, an installation officials sought for years. It’s the only school of its kind in Orange County.

Sharon Mitchael, who planned and organized the construction of the playground, said that with the help of donations from nine companies it was built in two weeks.

To be sure, for something so ingenious--a playground with tire-swings festooned with simple bells, sidewalks with easily identifiable surfaces and landscaping that doesn’t simply repeat itself--it was not a great feat of engineering.

“It was just something to keep blind kids from falling through the cracks,” Mitchael said.

April Dameron, a teacher with a stern yet sweet way with the children, said 6-year-old Kazuki Okoshi might have been one of those kids.

Instead, the playground unleashed something special in him, she said.

From the moment the playground was ready, Kazuki--a brash, loud, mischievous boy--navigated its nooks and bumps as if he had mapped it out in his head.

“He has a special talent,” Dameron said. And nobody, she figures, might have ever learned about that specialness had he not been allowed to trip in the dirt and step out into the grass to figure the way all by himself.