Salinas’s Tatum’s Garden inspired special needs park
Published in the February 18-March 3, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Christopher Jackson, 2 1/2, from Salinas enjoys a slide at Tatum’s Garden, a playground in Salinas for special needs children and others.
Photo by Marty Cheek
Local Intero real estate agent Ron Locicero has a vision to build in Morgan Hill a special playground for families with children who have special needs. One of the reasons he joined the city’s Parks and Recreation Commission last year was to put into action a group of volunteers who would join together to create an “inclusive and accessible playground” that would be open to all families — and might become a tourism draw for families in the region surrounding Morgan Hill.
On Feb. 6, Locicero traveled to Sherwood Park in Salinas with his wife Shirlee Locicero and Community Services Director Chris Ghione to visit Tatum’s Garden, an inclusive playground built two years ago. The site was inspired by Tatum Bakker, a child confined to a wheelchair due to spina bifida. Her mother Amanda Bakker gave the group a tour of the one-acre playground which features equipment designed with a whimsical farming theme.
Locicero’s vision to build a similar playground in Morgan Hill started when he and Shirlee were watching the news and saw a segment about Tatum’s Garden. The couple had both spent their professional careers in education — Shirlee for 29 years in various levels and Locicero for 41 years as a physical education instructor – and their dedication to children helped fuel the vision.
“I’ve been involved with working for children all my adult life,” he said. “I’m really excited about doing this playground project. I see it as a positive thing. I don’t see any downside to it. It’s great for Morgan Hill, it’s great for the Parks and Recreation Department, it’s great for everybody.”
On the morning the group visited the playground, Salinas resident Jeff Jackson played with his 2 1/2-year-old son Christopher on the swings, climbing ropes, slides and other equipment. The father and son visit the park about once a week.
“It’s really popular with kids,” Jackson said. “On a nice, sunny weekend afternoon, this place is really crowded. It’s probably the best park that I’ve ever seen.”
Jeff Jackson plays with his son Christopher on a horse playground ride at Salinas’s Tatum’s Garden. Photos by Marty Cheek
Tatum’s Garden encourages all children to enjoy the playground experience together, not just children with special needs, thus developing a sense of tolerance in young people, he said. The agricultural motifs of the equipment — such as tractors, friendly-looking carrots, and a red barn — help localize the experience for families visiting the playground, he said.
“It’s really cool because you can see the tractors and the vegetables, it kind of fits with some of the agricultural themes of Salinas,” Jackson said. “It’s fabulous and what’s really neat is all the sponsors that you see and business names, you recognize them and you know it’s awesome how much time and energy people put into this.”
Bakker described to Locicero and the other Morgan Hill residents how the vision for Tatum’s Garden was born when she and her husband Shawn visited Brooklyn’s Playground in Pocatello, Idaho. They realized their daughter might enjoy a similar inclusive playground in Salinas.
“The idea came because we stumbled upon an inclusive playground in another state totally by accident. At that time, our first daughter was in a wheelchair,” she said.
The community supported the idea, with the city of Salinas providing an “eye-sore” of a parking lot at Sherwood Park as the site for Tatum’s Garden. The firm Leathers & Associates, based in Ithaca, New York, was hired in May 2013 at a cost of $30,000 to help design and build the playground. Its designers came to Salinas schools and worked with children in focus groups to see what they would like to enjoy in a playground. With that information, Leathers designers spent five hours drawing plans for the proposed playground. These were used in raising $1.2 million in funds. Bakker estimates that an additional $200,00 was given in in-kind donations.
Morgan Hill Community Services Director Chris Ghione and Tatum’s Garden founder Amanda Bakker in the popular Salinas park.
Photos by Marty Cheek
The cost of the project was higher than usual for such a project because Tatum’s Garden required special plumbing and drainage costs and removal of asphalt. The ground also had to be leveled and compacted to support the playground, Bakker said.
Money for the project was raised by getting local businesses to serve as sponsors and individuals donating funds for recognition such as their names put on fence pickets surrounding the equipment.
“When you walk around and see all the names here (on pickets) and realize that represents $50 from an individual, every brick is $100, benches are $500, it gives it a different feel where people come here and realize that they participated in making it happen,” she said.
In half a year, about 80 percent of the cost of the playground was raised by the Salinas community. About 3,000 volunteers gave of their time for 10 days to build the playground, and everyone celebrated with a grand-opening ceremony Sept. 8. The playground is maintained by volunteers and the nonprofit Tatum’s Garden Foundation under a 25-year lease with the city of Salinas. Once a month, people come out for a community clean-up day where the equipment is disinfected, garbage cans are power-washed and restrooms are cleaned. A crew from HOPE Services is employed to help with the maintenance.
“We came up with an agreement with the city that it was in everyone’s best interest that we would take care of the playground and not basically hand this million-dollar playground to the city which has only six park staff and say, ‘Please do a good job taking care of it for us because it’s perfect and we want it to stay that way.’ They would have been just overwhelmed.”
For their efforts, the Bakkers last year received the prestigious Jefferson Award in a ceremony in Washington, D.C.
As part of their foundation’s charter, the nonprofit organization is set up to help other cities retrofit existing playgrounds for special needs children, and also partner with other communities interested in building their own inclusive playgrounds.
“I’m happy to offer whatever we can to make it happen for you guys,” Bakker told Locicero. “So when we get to the point where we want to talk about partnerships, we can discuss the role we can play.”
Ghione said the city of Morgan Hill is interested in bringing an inclusive playground to the city. He sees a volunteer-driven model similar to Tatum’s Garden making this goal a real possibility.
“My thought is community buy-in is the key to the success of this project, but we have to find out who the community drivers are going to be,” he said. “Ron Locicero is driven to make it happen. The key is to get the word out and develop a plan. The city is very interested in it from a park planning project — it’s something we don’t have.”
The tourism draw of a Morgan Hill inclusive playground can also serve as an added economic benefit of the project he said.
“We have the Outdoor Sports Center, we have the Aquatics Center,” Ghione said. “People come to us for recreational opportunities. So if you have a nice playground combined with good restaurants, people will come and spend the day.”
There are various potential sites for the playground in Morgan Hill. One option is Community Park which has plenty of parking for playground visitors and is a central location for the community, he said. Another option is for the city to build it on land it might purchase, such as in the Southeast Quadrant of Morgan Hill.
He recommends that the PRC put the project on its work-plan so that the city council can eventually make a decision on where to potentially locate the playground and start the fundraising process.
Locicero said he is optimistic that, with community support, the inclusive playground will become a reality in Morgan Hill.
“Amanda said she would help us get rolling,” he said. “And then she would put us in touch with Leathers, which is a huge step. The city has got to get on board and get us land wherever that may be. After that, the rest will fall in place just like it did in Salinas.”
The playground will be popular with many local families with children with special needs, Locicero said. In the Morgan Hill Unified School District, 972 children are classified as special education students. In the Gilroy Unified School District, that number is 1,272.
“I just think there’s a need for children to have a playground like this,” Locicero said. “We do a lot of great things for children, but we do nothing at all for the special needs kids. And this is an avenue to help kids with special needs.”
