With a new school year on the horizon, Jon Willing pleads the case for keeping schoolyards open after hours
Miles Willing takes a shot while playing basketball with his dad, Jon Willing, at a community school. Photo Credit Nicole Willing
We spent several warm weekend evenings last spring shooting hoops, but not before climbing a fence to access the locked schoolyard.
We weren’t the only ones.
Kids tossed over soccer balls and hopped the chain-link fence to play on the field. The shortest part of the fence started to bend out of shape from people hoisting themselves up and over. Some kids and adults landed hard and not always on their feet.
Padlocks at the gates were meant to keep people out, but they just forced people – us – to find the next-easiest-but-actually-dangerous way in.
It’s a shame when schools with fenced yards don’t allow the public to access their great amenities on weekends and weeknights. For this school year and through next summer, I encourage Ottawa school boards to consider opening their fenced schoolyards to the public if they aren’t already.
We love our neighbourhood just west of downtown. When we bought our home before having our son, we weren’t deterred by the home’s lack of a backyard because we took note of nearby parks and schools with playgrounds and sports fields.
When Miles started asking to play basketball more often earlier this year, we were shocked to find our local schoolyard locked on the weekend. It just seemed at odds with the public’s appetite to maintain access to parks and recreation amenities, a sentiment that grew during the COVID pandemic. It’s not just for the kids; adults are looking for a place to exercise, too.
I suspect many other families also rely on their community schools for park amenities. On one occasion, we met a kid whose parents told him to play at the school for the day. Did they know he had to scale a fence to kick a ball around the field?
It’s a shame when publicly funded schools lock their fenced yards, but I’m not blind to the challenges of managing these precious amenities. The case for keeping the schoolyards closed after hours is, unfortunately, pretty strong.
Vandalism, like graffiti tags, puts extra burden on school staff to monitor and fix equipment. The same goes for accidental damage that goes unaccounted for and immediately unnoticed, threatening the safety of everyone who uses the spaces and potentially adding costs to schools’ already-stretched budgets. Dangerous street-drug rubbish, like needles and glass pipes, might not be spotted before the first kids run into the yard. And what happens when someone is injured on a sports field in a schoolyard after hours? An easy way for a school to reduce the risk of liability is to simply restrict access to the spaces. Plus, organized sports teams could regularly overtake school fields for practices to avoid paying rental fees.
But these risks exist in every unfenced schoolyard and city park. While school boards include sports fields, basketball courts and playgrounds primarily to support educational programs, the amenities are unquestionably critical to support the health of the larger community.
Keep schoolyards open this school year. Please don’t make us scale a fence to shoot some hoops.
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