Kids get to play on the new playground at Rutherford Junior High
A horde of happy students sat in anticipation of the official ribbon-cutting on their new playground at Rutherford Junior High School last week.
Principal Diane Henare and student Charlotte Carter walked across the soft bark, sliced the ribbon and unleashed a stampede of students eager to test the structure out.
They were bouncing, they were swinging, they were climbing and running and yelling with delight as they broke in the new monkey bars, ropes and climbing wall.
Property manager at Rutherford, Bob Evans, said the playground had been a long time coming.
"In a school like this a playground is very important, you go back in Greek history, they talked about training the mind and the body and that's a philosophy that holds true.
Evans was surprised to get the green light from both.
"At first I was quite pessimistic about it, I've made funding applications with other organisations and never had a 100 per cent hit rate before," he said.
"This time, one gave us $10,000 and the other gave us $25,000. I was really happy about it."
The overall cost of the project is $95,000, but the structure has been built in a way that it can be added to if or when more funds can be attained.
Henare became the principal at Rutherford in 2015.
"When I first came here, the students had nothing. It has taken a long time to get to this point," she said.
"When I see the kids out there playing on and appreciating that playground, it's a fantastic feeling."
She said the project tied in well with the school curriculum and its sense of community.
"It's part of what we call the student voice, where students are able to be part of deciding what happens in the school. That's really important because they'll look after it, it won't get vandalised.
"It's also part of the technology curriculum, they're having to work through what the design looks like and how you take that design and turn it into a permanent structure like that."
