Kiwanis Club tackles playground

Napa County club members replace 60-year-old playground

Calistoga, California, Weekly Calistogan
http://www.weeklycalistogan.com/articles/2008/11/13/news/local/doc491d0217dbcde628500642.txt

A Napa County Superior Court judge, a top official from the Napa Chamber of Commerce and about four dozen other members of the Napa and Calistoga Kiwanis clubs came to Calistoga Saturday, united for a single purpose — to stamp out playground boredom at Calistoga Elementary School.

“What you’re looking at here are playgrounds 45 and 46,” said the group’s top coordinator Jim Roberts, from Napa. “There are really two playgrounds here, one for older kids and one for the younger kids, and we’ve combined them into one large project.”

The club’s efforts replaced the remains of a playground built at the school some 60 years ago, in 1948.

“The highlight of the old playground for us back in 1982 was the stack of old tractor tires,” said Calistoga Elementary School alumnus Julio Ambriz.

Ambriz and a close friend, Tyler Ticen, a financial advisor for Merrill Lynch in Napa, teamed up to help build the school’s new playground. Amriz works in the Calistoga Recreation Department and Ticen is a new Kiwanis member.

“I live in Napa now, but I grew up here,” Ticen said. “Julio and I attended school here in the early 1980s, and that pile of tires was the best part of the entire playground, so this is really something nice for the kids.”

This was Ticen’s first playground project as a Kiwanis member. Together, the group, which includes Napa County Superior Court Judge Stephen Kroyer, has installed 46 playgrounds in the last year or so, according to Roberts. In turn, the Kiwanis members passed the buck on where the project began several months ago. Most of the members pointed the finger at Jim Roberts. When grilled about where he got the idea, however, Roberts laid the blame for the Calistoga playground on Doug Ernst, publisher of The Weekly Calistogan.

“All I said to (Roberts) was ‘you guys have built playgrounds all over the place, why not Calistoga?” Ernst said. “He took it from there, contacted Calistoga School Superintendent Jeff Johnson and got the ball rolling.”

The new look

“This means a new face to the elementary school playground, that it’s a place for kids who are excited and enthusiastic, it’s fantastic,” said Calistoga Elementary School Principal Michelle Treuscorff, who joined the team at the school on Saturday. “What’s neat is that this has a climbing structure that is appropriate for the bigger kids and another for the younger children as well.

“It’s massive and colorful, and look at all the volunteers,” she said. “It’s amazing.”

The remains of the former playground stood silently behind the crew and their giant erector set as Treuscorff described its younger days.

“These are the last remnants of the former playground. They took out a metal climbing structure that was standing where we are now,” she said. “We had quite a large structure called tire mountain, and I believe there are only two tires left. They took it down after several children fell off of it and broke their arms. I home taught one of the students after he had fallen from them.”

That was 1983, when Treuscorff first came to Calistoga.

Group effort

“It started with (Ernst), he’s the one who told us they needed a playground up here,” Roberts said. “Our (Napa) club was able to get money from the club and from Community Projects — they’ve helped us so much with our playgrounds, having given us at least $150,000 over the years.”

Community Projects is “a group of great women” down in Napa, Roberts said. They have a thrift store in Napa and all the money they make from that store is used for projects throughout Napa County. Additional funds for the project came from the Calistoga Joint Unified School District.

If purchased individually, the new Calistoga Elementary School playground would cost $60,000, according to Roberts.

“That’s without the labor, that’s us, we’re all free,” he said. “Everyone here, except three school district employees, are employees.”

There were also several members of the Calistoga Kiwanis club helping out.

“We have taken us about six months to get to this point,” Roberts said. “We had to redesign the lot. We’ll be taking out all this ugly gravel, which is out of code. We’ll replace the gravel with splinterless bark so the kids don’t get hurt — on some parts of these structures they’ll be up in the air and they could fall — we want them to fall into something soft.”

The executive vice president of the Napa Chamber of Commerce, Lisa Batto, is also a new Kiwanis member and a mom. This was her first playground.

“My kids went to Belair School, and the Kiwanis Club built a new playground for Belair,” Batto said. “That was before I became a member. One of the neatest things is, as a parent, is to know that your kid is going to be playing on a playground that is constructed safely.”

Roberts said the new Calistoga playground will likely be done by the end of this week, after a cement box is built around the new playground and the bark put into place. By then, the group will have already gotten started assembling playground number 47, Roberts said.