Grants from the Jones Trust, Hopkins Foundation and the Sunflower Foundation Health Care for Kansas in Topeka have been combined to provide a walking and biking trail at Riverside School.
The trail is used regularly by students at the school and also is open for the public to enjoy, too, according to Riverside physical education teacher Steve Pletcher.
Pletcher wrote the grants that enabled the school to have a quarter-mile trail made of limestone screenings that don’t turn into mud puddles during wet weather and will be more accessible year-round. And the walking surface is better than the concrete Pletcher and his students had been using for their morning exercise before the trail was installed.
“Last year, I started a walking program for third- and fourth-graders, which took place before school,” he said, explaining that he wanted the youngsters to be able to get some exercise when they came to school early, rather than having to sit in the school’s gymnasium.
“Each day, we kept track of our laps and converted them to miles.”
They were able to use the concrete walking area five or six months during the year, he said.
By the end of the school year, Pletcher was busy trying to find a way to finance a walking and biking trail.
Sunflower Foundation might be willing to give the school a grant, he said, if there were matching funds available.
“I first started with Jones Trust and Hopkins Foundation,” he said. “Both of those agreed to come along and agreed to be partners, contingent on the Sunflower Foundation.
“I didn’t want to start with Sunflower until I knew I could get matching funds. … Once I received a commitment from Jones and Hopkins, then I wrote the Sunflower grant.”
By the time the money from all three sources was in, a total of $13,174 was available for the trail.
Pletcher said a long, deep concrete stairway that rises from the basketball courts to the OWLS was installed by Emporia Construction and the limestone screenings trail was built by Coffman Construction.
“They dug out six inches deep, 10 feet wide, and a quarter of a mile, and then they packed that,” he said, describing the process. “They poured in limestone screenings and then they packed it.”
The screenings are crushed limestone or the powdery pieces left over from other limestone projects.
“Once they put it in place and pack it and it gets moisture on it … it’s about as good as you can get for the money,” Pletcher said.
About $1,174 was left over to buy a few more trees and solar lighting for the project; those were items that also were included as part of the grant application.
The new trail begins with a handicap-accessible ramp at the corner of South Walnut Street and Rindom Road, runs down the side of the old football field west of the school, and winds into the Outdoor Wildlife Learning Sites that was begun several years ago by former Riverside teacher Troy Chapman.
The OWLS area — with its small beds of perennials, an assortment of mature trees and a bluestem pasture loaded with wild sunflowers to the south — offers a restful haven for children and adults alike.
“The good thing about having the trail, in my opinion, is that in the future we’re going to be able to hopefully continue to improve the OWLS with more trees, more perennials and just make it a really pretty place that anyone in the community could come and take a little walk through an area that’s used for students to help teach about the outdoors and plants and so on,” Pletcher said.
He wants to buy name plates later to help the students identify the burr oak, cottonwood, elm, hickory, pin oak, and locust trees in the OWLS area.
He plans to have students help weed the existing flower beds and would like to add a few beds of perennial flowers around the perimeters.
Extension horticulturalist Amy Jordan and a crew of master gardeners assisted with the first phase of the OWLS’ creation.
Parents of school children and volunteers from the community are welcome to help work on the second stage of the OWLS, with a goal of making it even more attractive and educational than it already is.
“Hopefully, we’ll get enough community involvement and school kids, maybe in three or four years it’ll be more beautiful than it is now,” Pletcher said.
solong (anonymous) says...
Good job Steve, anything to get those kids some exercise, away from video games and to appreciate nature. We need more of this for our kids.
September 22, 2009 at 4:02 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )