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Augustine School unveils new natural playground

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Augustine School has existed as a school long enough that its original playground equipment, which was donated by another school in North Carolina when Augustine first opened, had become out of date and it was time for an upgrade.

But when it came time to figure out how the school wanted to upgrade, a couple of teachers from the pre-K and elementary grades had an idea - a natural playground.

On Friday, Oct. 4, the school gathered to celebrate a ribbon cutting for that playground.

"This has really been in the works for quite a while," Headmaster Robert Stacey told the crowd of nearly 200 as a few students from the school played on the equipment. "Mrs. Carson and Mrs. Musselman had a couple of interesting ideas when they brought this to us about a natural playground.

"You'll look around and see there's not a lot of plastic or metal or bright colors that aren't usually found in the natural wooded area. A lot of the equipment is wood-based or rope."

Stacey added that equipment isn't as activity-specific as a lot of modern playground equipment, which is an added mental benefit for the children playing.

"If you're on the swings over there, there's not much else for a child to do on them but swing," Stacey said, pointing out the only thing made mostly of metal in the area. "But you see ropes and different wooden things that the kids can climb on and do different things, so that allows them to be creative while also exerting themselves during recess.

"We've got a dirt area that allows them to be creative, although it mostly just allows them to dig so far, but that can spark some creativity in itself."

Stacey's remark about digging in the dirt area came about the time one of the younger students playing while he was talking jumped into a hole nearly deep enough for the student to stand in and having to work to climb out.

The ribbon wasn't only cut on the new play area, but also on the area having an official name - Carson-Musselman Park.

Lindsey Carson is a pre-K educator at the school, and Malinda Musselman is a lower school learning specialist. They were part of the group who looked at different options of what to do with the playground and brought the idea of a natural playground to the school's leadership.

Once the school signed off on it, the natural playground became their responsibility to the point that the majority of their off-time this past summer was spent putting a lot of the things together in the area that would also bear their last names.

A wooden playhouse with various play cooking toys is at the front of it. There's a water pump in front of the house that's not connected to any groundwater, but there's an intermittent creek that flows through the area that sometimes has water flowing through it from a catch pond that was dug out on the adjacent property where Jackson-Madison County Schools is building the new Pope School.

"Sometimes when that pond gets full and water flows out, it would come toward our campus, and we decided to put that to use," Carson said. "So we laid a stone path toward the bed the water typically flows and made the creek."

Musselman explained the students can get buckets of water and pour it into a pot below the pump, and when they use the pump, it will take water out of the pump and bring it to the top.

"This teaches them working for what you want, but we also added an element of taking care of yourself and your toys with this," Musselman said. "If a child wants to play with the water and mud, that's fine. That's why it's all out here.

"But when play time is over, there's an expectation of cleaning yourself and the toys up before you put them away, and hopefully they're learning skills like that from this."

Behind the house are different pieces of wood hanging a few feet from the ground with different handles on them for children to climb on and move around. There's a hill through a grove of trees up a small hill that leads to the school's soccer field.

There were other things made of rope including one that looked like a spider web spread horizontally in a clearing just above the ground and a couple places where children could walk on one rope stretched between a pair of trees while holding on to another stretched a couple feet above it.

There are tree stump slices put throughout a couple of areas of the hill that serve as stepping stones. And at the top of the hill, there are a couple of slides made from culverts cut in half.

"We're really proud of the thought and planning that went into this and the work that went into making the planning reality," Stacey said. "And for years, students will enjoy this and learn a few lessons along the way and not even realize it until possibly later on in life."

Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news