... there should be a playground, a family says. It's helped raise $750,000, with $100,00 to go.
By BEN MONTGOMERY
Published September 17, 2006
TAMPA - First came the wheel, around 4000 B.C. Then came the spoke-wheeled chariot, in Asia Minor, around 2000 B.C. Then, if we skip ahead a tad, came a fellow named Harry Jennings, who built the first foldable wheelchair in a Los Angeles garage in 1933.
On Saturday, at a park in West Tampa, 7-year-old Sarah Busansky, who has cerebral palsy, sat in the battery-powered offspring of all that invention and thought about the one thing that's still missing:
A nice place to play.
Her mother, Stefani, and father, Ed, have been helping her with that for five years by raising money to build Freedom Playground.
That's why 250 people joined Sarah at MacFarlane Park for the second annual Tampa Wheel-A-Thon, some wearing T-shirts that quoted Plato: "Life must be lived as play."
That's why they brought envelopes full of cash and wheeled around a track on decorated chairs and ate barbecue chicken in the shade.
A huge set of blueprints for a new kind of playground - one with sensory gardens and tactile play items and push-button water toys - sat under a tent nearby.
Even though we've come a long way from the early requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Stefani Busansky said, there's still a long way to go to give kids with mobility issues the same opportunities as others.
The Freedom Playground Foundation raised more than $45,000 toward that goal at the event, half from a corporate donation.
The foundation and the city of Tampa have raised $750,000 and lack only $100,000 to fully fund the 25,000-square-foot playground for all kids, not just kids with special needs.
Groundbreaking is scheduled for October. The barrier-free playground will be the first of its kind in the Tampa area and one of six in the state, Stefani Busansky said.
Rebecca Vasey, 38, who runs an antique shop and has cerebral palsy, said when she was a child, going to a playground was complicated and difficult. Her parents had to carry her around and hold her on the equipment.
"Most of it stopped when I got bigger because I was too big to carry," she said.
Guess who can't wait to see Freedom Playground when it's complete.
