School officials in Hamilton decided to close playgrounds at 15 of the township's 17 elementary schools as the fall semester began.
You send your children to elementary school to master their multiplication tables, to study American history and to learn how to compose a grammatical sentence.
You don't send the to school to play on a damaged spiral slide with bolts protruding, or to use apparatus whose parts threaten to trap their heads, or send them plunging to the ground.
Faced with these hazards and others, school officials in Hamilton decided to close playgrounds at 15 of the township's 17 elementary schools as the fall semester began.
The closures followed inspections by an outside firm that turned up hazardous conditions on the playground at Klockner Elementary School, many of them involving worn-out equipment and inadequate protective surfaces.
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The 56-page inspection report called attention to a lack of wheelchair access to the facilities, and found a desperate need for additional safety surfacing - a key precaution when 68 percent of all playground injuries are caused by fall, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission says.
In a state where bridges are crumbling and whole portions of aging roadways are routinely forced to shut down for repairs, we're not surprised when infrastructure woes make their way down to the hyperlocal level of our school districts.
Not surprised, but deeply concerned.
It's especially galling to Hamilton's parents that the Humana Foundation named their township a "Playful City USA," one of 241 across the country to be singled out. The designation honors communities for their efforts to make it easy for children to get the balanced and active play they need to thrive.
"The township was doing inspections all these years, and [the playgrounds are] woefully in bad shape," says resident Lisa Linkowsky, questioning how conditions were allowed to deteriorate so grievously. "And now who's going to pay for it? Who's going to take care of it?"
Who indeed?
Back in March of 2013, alarmed by a letter from the district's insurance provider, school and township officials agreed that the district would be responsible for maintaining the equipment.
The formal agreement is still waiting for sign-off by the school board.
We don't fault the school district for seeing the need to close the school playgrounds - better to keep the township's children safe than allow them to use swings, slides and see-saws that could injure them.
We do think someone fell asleep at the wheel while these hazardous conditions were permitted to develop over the months and years.