California schools fail us by locking the gates to playgrounds badly needed by kids | Opinion
The misuse of public school facilities in California is what happens when common sense is suffocated by limited thinking and a lack of awareness within a bureaucracy.
Many public school advocates argue that facilities and services should be at the center of a community. They provide education, social services, school lunch programs and safety for children in the community. Yet many of those same advocates who point to staggering child obesity statistics don’t seem to care that the school playground and fields where kids might play after school hours are fenced off on weekends, late afternoons and during the summer when students are not on campus.
Opinion
Every one of these facilities was built with property taxes and building fees paid by California taxpayers. Yet, unless those taxpayers happen to be school students, many of the athletic fields are closed for public use. That is completely inconsistent with the concept of making a public school a gathering place.
When advocates of open-school facilities speak up, one of the first objections is that the schools are not designed for that use. The answer to that issue seems pretty obvious: When new schools are built, don’t design them that way.
Yet, right now, a school is being expanded in my neighborhood in Woodland where a chain-link fence is cemented all the way around into the new recreation areas. It does keep students in, but it also keeps community participation out.
Then you have the lawyer for the school district who will inevitably argue that the school can’t keep their campus open after hours for liability reasons. Nonsense. If that was a good reason, city, state and national parks would not exist at all. It is an amazing contradiction when school administrators use public parks for activities during the school day but then lock up the school recreation areas to exclude the public after hours.
People are complaining about a lack of recreation facilities, but it’s really just a lack of recreation facility access that’s the actual problem. We do a horrible job of managing public assets, as local school boards often only want to do what is in their given mandate and ignore what’s good for the community. My local school district, Woodland Joint Unified, is a prime example of this. Davis Joint Unified, meanwhile, does a much better job of integrating these assets into its whole community.
School trustee candidates should be asked about this. Does the candidate’s vision for the school system include joint use of recreation facilities for the public?
More and more private businesses are being asked to include community stakeholders in the decisions that are made. Yet public school resources are being made available with the very limited view that outdoor public school facilities are only to be made available to students during the school day. This is unacceptable.
Put fences and closed gates in places that are needed to protect students but then open those gates to allow the public to use the playground equipment and sports facilities after hours in a way that benefits the children and everyone else in the community. This is not a question of resources; it’s a question of what is valued by school boards and communities all over California.
Matt Rexroad is a political consultant specializing in redistricting and independent expenditures.
