An anonymous social media account under the alias of “playground JFK” made its first post in November 2017: “The front playground at the Kennedy School is a parking lot. It’s time to change that.”
Over the next 14 month there were saw 22 posts on the account on Twitter, now known as X, ranging from callouts of Somerville’s mayor at the time, Joseph Curtatone, to photos of the Kennedy play space accompanied by cutting analyses or reactions. The final post came in January 2019: “The city has secured grant funds to create a design for a new playground. But when will the design begin? And after the design … what?”
Almost six years later, the questions stand.
The John F. Kennedy School at 5 Cherry St., near Porter Square, teaches children from pre-K to eighth grade and has three district special education programs. The school has a “tot lot” in the back for children pre-K through second grade; the front lot is for third through eighth graders.
Many parents have compared the front lot to a prison yard, as it has no play structures or equipment aside from a few basketball hoops. “They don’t do anything. There’s not even enough balls,” said Neva Durand, a former parent teacher association member and parent of Kennedy first and third graders.
The school was awarded a $65,000 Community Preservation Act design grant in 2019 to redo the front lot and create a universal play space, but there have been no tangible steps forward.
The inaction was discussed at a City Council meeting Nov. 14. “Since the application was submitted, 318 students have graduated from the Kennedy without any progress being made on this project,” said Kat Johnston, a parent of three children, including two at Kennedy, whose advocacy call for an update on the playground redesign from the city’s director of infrastructure and asset management.
The School Building Facilities and Maintenance Special Committee got an update Nov. 18 from the city’s director of public space and urban forestry, Luisa Oliveira, who said the project was originally on hold due to the Covid pandemic. “We are presently working on the request for proposals from landscape architects,” she said.
It has been long awaited, Kennedy PTA spokesperson Andrew Sessa said. “The Kennedy community had the understanding at this time last year, which we now realize was not based on correct information, that the RFP would soon post and that there would be a firm hired and community engagement starting by this point,” Sessa said.
Councilors Lance Davis and Naima Sait asked Oliveira to provide clarity on the timeline and wondered if the process could be expedited.
“There are no shortcuts. I would love to be able to build a park in two months. It’s not humanly possible,” Oliveira said.
As someone who spent five years working with the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Johnston said she has been in Oliveira’s shoes but was underwhelmed by the update. “I have a lot of compassion, but I thought it was pretty dismissive of the concerns to say that a timeline couldn’t be given.” Johnston thinks there is room to speed up the process in the RFP posting and bid selection process. “At this point people have been waiting six years and there’s been no progress made.”
“I’ve been asking about this for nine years now and they’re no closer to getting started,” said Kristen Cox, parent to Kennedy fourth and eighth graders. When her research showed there was a small pool of contractors used for previous playground builds in Somerville, Cox asked Oliveira at a Ward 5 meeting in the fall: “Shouldn’t this be a pretty quick RFP process?” Oliveira disagreed strongly.
Community engagement could be a place to speed the process. Past processes have taken anywhere between two and 13 meetings, Oliveira said, and residents and officials hoped it could be shortened by using residents’ opinions compiled over the years through projects and initiatives – polls by Cox for the June issue of the student-led newspaper The Kennedy Chronicle, for instance, and playground models built by students in a second grade class last school year. When councilor Jesse Clingan suggested it could all offer insight to the desires of the school community, Oliveira said they were “not specific, thorough enough or inclusive enough. We absolutely will have a much more thorough community engagement process.”
Universally accessible playground
Making the new playground universally accessible – able to be enjoyed by kids with varying physical, sensory, emotional and cognitive abilities – was called the most important consideration by many meeting participants.
“There’s currently nothing for differently abled students to use at the school, except for one swing,” Johnston said.
Nicole Cannon, a Somerville resident whose 4-year-old daughter has a disability and will likely attend Kennedy, is paying close attention because “playgrounds offer an opportunity for kids to connect and to develop social skills.” Her family frequents the Cypress street playground in Brookline – like the Danehy Park playground in Cambridge, universally accessible but smaller and more similar in size to Kennedy’s front lot. Cannon said makes it the perfect example for what could be. “It would feel like a dream come true if Kennedy had a playground like that,” she said.
Durand agrees with the calls for a universally accessible playground and feels like community engagement is being dragged out. “It feels like the buck stops with the mayor’s office. Everything’s some community process. We have to talk to every single person in Somerville before we can make a decision. It feels like an abdication of responsibility for an elected official. Do your job, make decisions and get things moving,” she said.
Pressure is mounting. “For the sake of accountability and transparency – two values the current administration has prioritized since taking office – it would seem important, and possible, to at least give a sense of the time frame for these first steps. We look forward to learning in the short term when the RFP will go live on the city’s procurement site and then to learning what the approximate timing will be for review of the responses to the RFP, interviews and hiring of the design firm,” said Sessa on behalf of the Kennedy parent-teacher group. No update has been posted to the Somervoice website since the meeting, indicating the request for proposals has not been posted.
Johnston said she was happy to work with the city in any way possible to keep things moving. “I believe that government is for the public good, and so are the schools, and that sometimes along the way it gets really winding to get to the end goal,” she said.
A stronger
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It was delayed because of Covid but they are only now putting out an RFP for landscape architects? That’s competence in action.
Here’s hoping once they start they do a better job getting it done than Cambridge with the Peabody school, where the playground was torn out last February and it appears it won’t be replaced until spring 2025.
MA has a serious problem of leaving grant money on the table for years, reducing its efficacy due to inflation.