A DREAM REALIZED
Mother’s wish for playground for disabled comes true thanks to donations, volunteers
“We have tried so many times before to get it right. Now is the time we can make it happen,” said Ellen Mcwilliams-woods, Akron City Schools assistant superintendent and
GALENA — Ronnie Bottoms surveyed the activity around him — a small group assembling slides, people hoisting a deck up to the new play set, a man firing up a concrete saw — and shook his head in wonder.
In all his years in the playground business, he said, he has never had a project go so smoothly, so enjoyably and so quickly as the one underway the past week at Hylen Souders Elementary School in Delaware County’s Big Walnut School District. He credits the 75 or so volunteers who tirelessly split a stretch of 12-hour days to build the new handicapped-accessible Souders Community Playground —
an outdoor recreation area that with its ramp, low-slung and reachable play panels, and slides and spinners that don’t require difficult climbing will be accessible for children of all abilities.
“The success of community builds can be a crapshoot,” said Bottoms, president of Bluegrass Sales and Recreation, the company out of Danville, Kentucky, that designed and helped build the Little Tikes playground structure. He pointed to the relentless and harsh weather conditions of Friday, when volunteers worked through snow, sleet, heavy rain and high winds.
“Not one volunteer walked away,” Bottoms said during his Saturday shift. “They all turned their backs to the wind and kept working.”
But, he added, he thinks that’s because this is no ordinary project.
He tipped his head and pointed toward Amy Ranalli, who at that moment was using an impact driver to bolt pieces together.
“Meeting her son? Yep. This playground is special,” he said.
Ranalli has three sons in the district, Rocco, Nico and Marco. But it is 5-year-old Marco, in his second year of preschool at Souders, who was the inspiration for this project. The Dispatch chronicled his journey last year because doctors say they know of no one exactly like him. Something unexplained happened in utero during Amy’s pregnancy that prevented Marco’s motor neurons to his arms from firing. With no stimulus, muscles never formed. So he has arms but they are limp and floppy, of little use.
The fact that Marco couldn’t really use any of the playground equipment at his elementary school troubled the Ranalli family, the isolation of it all causing extra worry. So when Mark and Amy Ranalli learned that the existing playground might be slated for an upgrade, they asked about the possibility of increased accessibility and inclusivity. PTO president Shannon Buckler, whose older brother has cerebral palsy, didn’t hesitate before saying yes.
Together, she and Amy Ranalli led efforts to raise $100,000 through grants and donations to combine with $30,000 from the PTO’S own funds to pay for the playground, which doesn’t replace the traditional one but is in addition to it.
Buckler said an estimated 400 students in the Big Walnut district have some kind of disability, but that this inclusive playground was really built for the entire community.
Anna Norton will be Marco’s kindergarten teacher next school year. She helped on Saturday.
“No kid should be secluded just because they are limited in a different way physically,” she said. “I’m so excited that we have this here. This is definitely a teachable moment for our community.”
Volunteers were expected to put the finishing touches on the structure on Monday. The poured-rubber play surface underneath should be installed in the next couple of weeks, and an official grand opening will be planned after that.
Evan Killilea was among those working Saturday. His wife teaches in the district, and his sister-in-law teaches at Souders. With a construction background, he saw this as a perfect opportunity to give back.
“I grew up enjoying climbing on jungle gyms. I can’t imagine being a kid and seeing all this fun stuff on your playground and not being able to use it,” Killilea said. “Inclusiveness is huge because to me, we’re all equal.”
Amy Ranalli said that when the company sent her photos of the equipment loaded onto the back of a truck, headed to Galena, she could no longer hold it together.
“I just sobbed. I sobbed and sobbed,” she said Saturday, while taking a short break. “It’s kind of surreal now. I’m so proud of the community.”
As for Marco? No kids were allowed to help, so he spent Saturday playing with his brothers and grandma in the basement of their home just down the road, while his mom and dad and grandpa volunteered.
He’d been by to see it, though.
Asked what he thought about the new playground, he just grinned. “It’s good.”
As for his mom? When all the assembly work was nearly finished, Amy Ranalli spotted the still-soft, just-poured concrete at the base of the “spinner,” a low-to-the-ground merrygo-round that anyone can enjoy. It was the first item placed on the PTO’S fundraising “wish list.”
She grabbed an uncapped ink pen from the table where those 75-plus volunteers had signed in. And she walked over.
In the cement, she scrawled two small words: For Marco.