As Thoreau winds down, district turns to Alcott playground makeover

Plans to replace the Alcott Elementary School playground are underway, but with little to no capital funds available, district leaders forecast that the project’s future will depend on outside funding. 

School officials have begun planning for a new playground to replace the current site facing Laurel Street. It and other capital projects were discussed at the April 15 Acton School Committee meeting. 

“We invited the contractor that worked on the Thoreau playground [to] visit the site, measure it, and offer some suggestions,” Robert Conry, assistant superintendent for finance and operations, told the committee.

The project is still in its earliest stages, but it is expected to include students’ input and address the site’s longstanding drainage problems. 

Conry said conditions were severe enough that “it was called the ‘La Brea Shoe Pit’ at one point. We lost some sneakers in the playground.”

He said the project’s financing will have to come from outside the school’s budget. “We don’t have any capital funds available for this this year,” he said. 

The district plans to apply for Community Preservation Committee funding by the next deadline in early September but does not yet have a cost estimate. Schools Superintendent Laurie Hunter said Alcott’s Parent Teacher Group is planning to form a committee to fundraise for the playground as well. 

Community members raised more than $630,000 for Thoreau’s new playground.

‘Menu of options’

Across the district, other facilities projects are moving forward, but not without challenges.

Projects at Thoreau Elementary School — the nature space next to the playground, paving the parking lot, and repairing the basketball court — stalled after bids came in at nearly double the original estimate. 

Hunter said the district now plans to scale back the scope and divide the work into smaller pieces, focusing on the highest priorities, so that improvements to other district buildings can come quicker.

“We need to wrap Thoreau up and move on to another place,” Hunter said. “It’s getting a really huge facelift, so I’m kind of directing that I want to compromise on some of these and move on to some of the other projects.”

Also discussed at the April 15 meeting: Projects like HVAC repairs, pavement repairs, tree removal, and the removal of a broken seesaw at Willard. 

The challenge with some of the larger projects, Conry said, will be balancing funding with quality. 

“We’ll probably come up with a menu of options and costs so that we can see what the costs are that go with the different options,” he said while discussing repaving sidewalks at Alcott. “We have to make a decision on the tradeoff.”