Friendship, community and compassion have come together to provide a truly inclusive playground experience at Dr. Morris Gibson School.
The new wheelchair accessible merry-go-round, known as a we-go-round, was unveiled on Oct. 8 after an inspirational fundraising campaign spearheaded by two Okotoks families generated the 50 thousand dollars required.
“When we found out it was 50 thousand we were all just shell-shocked and thought how are we going to do this?” said Cheryl Alwood, whose daughter Bentlee is a wheelchair bound student with Rett syndrome at the school. “But we did it and Okotoks rallied behind us, they really did.
“This is an amazing pandemic story because we did something great in such a crappy time.”
Student Ella Cutting got the ball rolling on the project with a presentation to the administration at Dr. Morris Gibson and the Foothills School Division detailing how some children weren’t able to access the playground equipment.
Okotoks’ Wildeman family became involved with daughter Gabbi a best friend and classmate of Bentlee’s at Dr. Morris Gibson.
“Gabbi and Bentlee met in kindergarten,” said Gabbi’s father Blake Wildeman. “She came home from school and said she had a new friend and her friend was in a chair. Through volunteering and different family school events we got to meet them — Marrett (Alwood) and Cheryl are fantastic people.
“Bentlee and Gabbi hit it off and the school has been kind enough to keep them in the same class because Bentlee seems to respond to Gabbi pretty well when she’s having her diva moments when she doesn’t want to do a task they want them to do.
“My favourite story of all time, in Grade 1 or 2 and they pulled Gabbi out of a spelling or math test because Bentlee was having a tough go in the gym and they had Gabbi come and talk to her and Bentlee started to do what they asked.
“I’m pretty proud of my daughter and the efforts she puts in because this is one of her best friends, if not her best friend in the world, and they’ve never had a conversation.”
Initially, the idea was to have a wheelchair accessible swing – one that comes at a cost of approximately 13 thousand dollars.
“My family and another family in Okotoks raised 13 thousand dollars in a week to get the swing,” Cheryl said. “Then we found out after we asked about the wheelchair swing that the school had said ‘actually Cheryl it’s not a swing that the wheelchair actually goes on. It’s a swing where you take the child out and put the child on the swing. It’s for wheelchair kids, not a wheelchair itself.
“And I said, ‘we can’t do that.’ Because a lot of these children, and I know this because my daughter is in a wheelchair, you can’t put them out of the wheelchairs and into the swing because they’re medically fragile or some of them are just too heavy.”
Realizing the swing would not be a universally accessible option, Cheryl discussed with her husband about the option of fundraising for a fully wheelchair accessible swing — which comes at a 50 thousand dollar price tag.
That’s when the fundraising efforts kicked into overdrive, starting in February.
“So my family and the Wildemans have raised 42 thousand dollars solely on our own,” Cheryl said. “We did bottle drives, we did Mother’s Day gifts, we did space books, we did absolutely everything and asked everyone we knew.”
Helen Oakes, whose son Cooper is a wheelchair bound student at the school, organized a number of food truck event fundraisers that have also made a major impact in the overall drive.
“There have been so many people that have helped us do this,” Cheryl said. “Friends, family, corporations, small people, big people.”
The project shifted from swing to we-go-round with the latter a more inclusive option that allows for children in wheelchairs to use the equipment at the same time as their classmates.
“It’s more inclusive,” Cheryl said. “With a wheelchair swing it’s just for a wheelchair child, that’s it, you can’t put anybody else on it.”
Kiwanis Okotoks jumped into the project through community connections and the service group did fundraising and reached out to its network to assist with gifts in kind to get the project over the finished line, said member Ryan Duke, with further plans for phase-two of the project to make more of the existing structure more inclusive along with the addition of more ground level play equipment.
"We had to dig out the hole for the base of it and it was something like 98 per cent compacted gravel, I showed up and they said we need a jackhammer, and even last week we were out racking some of the dirt away," Duke said. "It was really nice to get outside, first-off, and get hands on volunteer time in, so that you can see what you're doing instead of applying for grants and things like that.
"We really can't say enough about the good work the parents group did and we were just happy to bring it over the finish line and looking forward to phase-two."
Blake Wildeman, who has grown up in the area and is deeply embedded in minor baseball and hockey in Okotoks, said this project reflects the true meaning of community.
“I’ve been here since ’89 and the town has always been like this,” he said. “Obviously, it’s grown so much with new folks coming in every year and they’re jumping in too.
“It’s pretty cool to be a part of the community like that, that’s willing to do that.”
