David Sanders / Arizona Daily Star
Whitney Hampton, project manager for Kaboom, leads C.E. Rose kids in the Kaboom cheer after they drew their designs for the ideal playground. Physicians at Tucson Orthopaedic Institute, 2424 N. Wyatt Drive, are raising $60,000 for equipment to build a playground at the school.

If there is one thing doctors are not taught in medical school, it's how to assemble a playground designed by South Side elementary students.
 
Physicians at Tucson Orthopaedic Institute, 2424 N. Wyatt Drive, are raising about $60,000 for equipment to manually build a playground at C.E. Rose Elementary School in one day next March with the help of national nonprofit group Kaboom and community members.
 
"Planning day," when 15 C.E. Rose students articulated with crayon drawings what a dream playground would look like, was held Thursday at the school.
 
"We're very lucky," C.E. Rose principal Stephen Trejo said.
 
Once each student has drawn an ideal playground, Kaboom members, faculty and the doctors will go over the artwork and decide what is feasible. In the case of the Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and the Blind, 1200 W. Speedway, which worked with Kaboom and Home Depot on its new playground in March, students were given three potential playgrounds to choose from based on their drawings, and a vote was taken.
 
"It was the most wonderful experience," Doris Woltman, ASDB's superintendent, said.
 
C.E. Rose, made up of about 500 pre-kindergarten to fifth-grade students, has four full basketball courts and a large field, with worn-down yellow grass next to the courts and school.
 
"We want something nicer and bigger to play with," fourth-grader Selena Moreno, 9, said. Moreno is one of the students who will be drawing a perfect playground and said she hopes to create something "everyone could play on." It'll have monkey bars, space for games of tag and handicapped access, she said.
 
The idea for the project at C.E. Rose, 710 W. Michigan Drive, came from Tucson Orthopaedic's Dr. Lawrence Housman, who participated in similar events with the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons in New Orleans and San Francisco. A few years ago the academy,

with help from Kaboom, began volunteering the day before its annual convention to build a safe playground for the host city.
 
Kaboom, headquartered in Washington, D.C., plays organizer and middleman between corporations and communities to help build hundreds of safe and handicapped-accessible playgrounds per year all over the country, its Web site says.

After helping Kaboom and the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons in San Francisco with Tucson Orthopaedic CEO John Cole, Housman wondered if the same magic could be brought to a deserving area in Tucson. Housman is a member of the Rincon Rotary Club, which recently helped out a wellness center near C.E. Rose, a school he found lacking a safe playground.
 
Tucson Orthopaedic deals with the need for safer playgrounds every day, attending to broken arms and wrists due to what Housman calls FOOSH: falling on outstretched hands. While Housman admits an injury-proof playground is nonexistent, things like rubberized mats or wood chips placed over concrete and plastic coating on equipment can curb trips to the emergency room.

Every year the C.E. Rose student council would try to come up with money for a quality playground, said Delia Aruiza, a fourth-grade teacher and organizer of the event. The most money available was $2,000, Aruiza said, which would not suffice. For this project, C.E. Rose was asked to contribute $5,000, and did so using tax-credit donations, Trejo said.
 
Tucson Orthopaedic raised $15,000, matched by the Tucson Medical Center Foundation, Housman said. More funding is coming from the Zimmer Corp. in Indiana and local contributors, Cole said.
 
Tucson Orthopaedic has more than 100 volunteers for the construction day consisting of doctors, family members and friends, but more volunteers are needed as C.E. Rose was asked to gather 100 community members as well.
 
On building day, Kaboom will organize and supervise as volunteers break up into teams to assemble equipment such as slides. Some professional assistance will be needed, such as the pouring of concrete, but Kaboom's job is to set up all necessary elements for the volunteers to have the playground completely finished by the early evening of the same day. "It's a crazy day," Housman said.
 
It's a first for the Tucson Orthopaedic physicians to come together and physically work on a community event, instead of just "throwing money" at something, Housman said.
 
Aruiza said the event would unite the two seemingly distant communities for a common goal. "It's a tremendously rewarding experience," Cole said.
 
Contact reporter Kevin Smith at 434-4079 or ksmith@azstarnet.com.

TOI Press Release