Aromas School celebrates completion of phase one, phase two to
get under way
As recently as last fall, the play field at Aromas school was
spotted with gopher holes. The lawn was a patchwork quilt of green
grass mixed with dark brown dried patches. The uneven terrain
flooded on one side every time it rained.
Aromas School celebrates completion of phase one, phase two to get under way
As recently as last fall, the play field at Aromas school was spotted with gopher holes. The lawn was a patchwork quilt of green grass mixed with dark brown dried patches. The uneven terrain flooded on one side every time it rained.
“Actually, there was not a lot we couldn’t do but the safety [was an issue],” said Mike Dorney, the coach for the school. “For state testing, the track was so beat up, we had to go to Anzar.”
Whenever it rained, the field flooded so much the students were limited to games they could play on the blacktop.
“It crowned in the middle so when it did rain, we weren’t able to use it,” Dorney said.
But since January the students have had a gravel track paved along the side and the grass has been evened out and resodded. The school celebrated a grand opening of the field June 1 with some of the people who made the project possible.
Graniterock, Soilserv/John Pryor Business Unit and the home and school club donated money, time and materials to the project. The entire project will be completed during the summer when a tennis court, a new fence and drainage will be installed. Trees will also be planted. Graniterock is donating about $180,000 worth of work and materials to the school, according to Principal Stephanie Siddens.
“My goal is to have a true community school, with a nice campus,” said Siddens, who has been at the school for two years. “This has a huge effect on the learning that occurs here. What happens outside has a huge effect on what happens inside the school.”
Just before the start of a ribbon cutting ceremony to celebrate the new track, Siddens asked students and teachers who had been hurt on the field to raise their hands. Nearly half the hands in the audience shot up.
“The collaboration between outside business made it a true public and private partnership,” she said.
As part of the ceremony, all the students lined up on the track to pass through a red ribbon as part of the official ribbon cutting. The children stood with their classmates and curved around a quarter of the track. The eighth-graders sauntered along the quarter-mile track while the younger students ran, skipped and held hands. After each student made one trek around the field, they were offered cookies and drinks.
Some headed to the swing set, some to the blacktop and others started up a game of soccer on the much safer field.
“It had lots of bumpy cracks,” said Brianna Denny, a fifth-grader who remembered the field as it was last year. “The grass was half dead and had lots of blank spots. It was all cracked.”
She and her friend Juliana Morales talked about the flooding on the right side of the field.
“The track has cement and that makes it better because you can always know where it is,” Denny said.”
She enjoys playing lacrosse or running on the field during P.E. Morales said playing soccer is her favorite thing on the new field.
Dorney has seen a change in his students’ attitude during P. E. and free play times.
“It was amazing,” he said. “It opened up right after winter and the kids seemed more dynamic and there were more smiles.”
