Las Vegas students want safer playground at elementary school

The playground at Stanford Elementary School is crumbling, and fourth-graders are taking a stand.

At a January school organizational team meeting, the students presented the advisory committee with a persuasive essay addressed to the Clark County School Board.

“The blacktop is not safe. Kids slip, fall and get hurt badly,” it read.

The letter is the third one the school organizational team, created by legislation reorganizing the Clark County School District, has sent to the School Board to change the way the district operates and assists schools.

Under the reorganization, schools are supposed to have more control over budget decisions, which in theory is intended to make it easier for schools to address problems such as unsafe playgrounds. But as the Stanford parents are learning, the reimagining of the district is still a work in progress.

Requests like playground repairs still must be funded out of a capital budget managed by the district’s central services office. That means the project at the school on East Harris Avenue in Las Vegas must wait until the district approves a contract for the work.

That irks Amy Stankosky, 51, a parent representative on the school organizational team.

“They sold this as parents were going to have an input in how money is spent and decisions that are made. There’s very little power or input that we have,” she said.

At least 150 students at Stanford have been treated for abrasions this school year, according to the district, although it was unclear how many of those were attributable to the playground. The district could not immediately say whether the number of injuries at the school serving just more than 600 students was higher than at comparable schools.

Stankosky’s two youngest daughters attend Stanford, as did her four older kids, but she can’t remember any major upgrades to the playground during that time, either.

In a statement, the district said officials are working on a public bid for asphalt repairs at multiple schools, including Stanford.

“CCSD staff have been evaluating district buildings for maturing infrastructure and have been working to schedule repairs based on many factors. As part of this assessment, the asphalt at Stanford Elementary was reviewed and identified for repairs. The school administration has been working with multiple departments within CCSD to address this issue, even prior to the correspondence from the SOT,” the statement said.

The timeline for the bid process and then the completion of the repairs is unclear. The district estimated the cost of the asphalt replacement at Stanford, which includes areas outside the playground, at between $400,000 and $600,000.

In the meantime, the blacktop continues to get worse, said Stankosky. Twice so far this year, her youngest daughter has fallen and injured herself, once so badly the school called Stankosky to come pick her up.

That fall, which happened in physical education class, left a deep gash on her daughter’s elbow that took a few weeks to heal, Stankosky said.

“As a school organizational team, we’re keeping our eyes and our ears open for what needs to be improved at the school,” she said.

Contact Meghin Delaney at 702-383-0281 or mdelaney@reviewjournal.com. Follow @MeghinDelaney on Twitter.