Fair 48° F

Home > Archive > Mar 27, 2008

A Playground for Everyone
By Cami Cox
Staff Writer
Sportsman's Warehouse in St. George is teaming up with one very special 7-year-old on March 29 to raise money for an improvement at the boy's school.
Tate Davis, a first-grader at Bloomington Elementary, was injured a few years ago in an automobile/pedestrian accident. Since then, he has been confined to a wheelchair and will be for life. But Tate continues to be upbeat and happy, said his mom, Stephanie Davis, and he has been the inspiration for a project to improve the playground at his school, making it more accessible for him and every disabled child at Bloomington Elementary.
“(The playground) is all American Disabilities approved, but they want to take it one step further,” Sportsman's Warehouse general manager Gary Watts said. “If you met this kid, you'd be on board, too.”
Watts has known Tate ever since Sportsman's Warehouse opened in St. George. Tate's dad, Greg Davis, is an avid hunter and fisherman, and he frequently brings Tate along with him on shopping trips to the store. While at Sportsman's, Tate wheels around effortlessly on the store's cement floor, Watts said, but out on the playground at school, it's a different story.
“Right now, they've got the wood chips down there, so these (disabled) kids are just basically sitting on the edge of the playground, watching all their friends play,” Watts said.
Stephanie Davis noticed last year, when Tate was a kindergartner, that though he interacted with his friends in class and in the hallways, at recess, he ended up on the outs when it came time to play.
“The younger kids really play on the playground, and he can't even go up to it,” she said.
Because the playground is surfaced with wood chips, Tate and the other wheelchair-bound children at Bloomington Elementary are largely left to sit and watch while their peers play on the equipment and interact with each other. Tate would love to grab his friends' feet as they go down the slide or talk and joke with his buddies, she said, but if he tries to roll out onto the playground, his wheelchair will sink into the wood chips and ultimately tip over or fall backward.
Stephanie Davis approached administrators at the school about the possibility of resurfacing the playground so disabled kids, like Tate, could participate, too – not just kids in wheelchairs, but any child with a gait impairment. Though they were sympathetic about the problem, school administrators said there wasn't much they could do.
“It's just so expensive that they can't feasibly do it,” Stephanie Davis said.
She learned that to resurface the playground with rubber tile (shock absorbent for safety but also flat for wheelchair and crutch access) would cost about $15,000 – a price the school can't fit into its budget. But if the money was raised by some other means, school officials told her, they were willing to allow the project to move forward.
So a brainstorming process began to find a way to finance the playground project. When Watts and others at Sportsman's Warehouse learned what the Davises were trying to do, they were eager to join forces with one of their favorite young customers and his parents.
“They're just really cool people,” Stephanie Davis said. “I just think you don't see businesses embrace things like that very often. They've really just put a lot of their time and a lot of their energy into something that's not going to benefit them in any way, just because they're good.”
To raise funds for the playground resurfacing, it was decided that a carnival would be hosted at Sportsman's Warehouse, with a variety of activities and goodies to thump up some cash and provide entertainment for those attending. The event will be open to the public, and there will be a variety of activities there, such as a mechanical bull sponsored by the National Guard, a climbing wall, a bounce house, and even a real Dale Earnhardt Jr. NASCAR vehicle that people can have their pictures taken in front of. There will also be food at the event and drawings for prizes, including two guns (one donated by Sportsman's Warehouse and the other by another local merchant) and some other merchandise, as well.
“We hope to have a lot of giveaways,” Stephanie Davis said. “There's going to be a lot of food, and it's going to be kind of a carnival atmosphere, so it should be a lot of fun for families. We just hope that they come out and support a good cause and have a good time.”
If they are successful in getting the new playground surfacing for Bloomington Elementary, the Davises hope they may inspire other local schools to do the same for their disabled students.
The carnival will take place on March 29 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Sportsman's Warehouse, 2957 E. 850 North in St. George (near Costco).
For more information about the event or to contribute to the project, contact the store at 634-7300.

---