As you may or may not know, Cedar Way Elementary in Mountlake Terrace won a $50,000 grant from Pepsi in December for a new playground. If all goes well, the new playground will be installed this summer. Here’s more from the Cedar Way PTO:

The committee has been working to get feedback from the students on equipment ideas for the new playground, as well as working with staff on developing ideas for an outdoor learning space with garden elements. We are very close to selecting a playground vendor. Over the past few weeks we have worked with two vendors to come up with equipment ideas and to propose an overall budget. Once we have the new vendor selected we will work with them to include playground pieces that the students wanted and provide a design back to the community (probably in late April).

We’ve also been working with a designer supplied by the school district to help craft the overall upgrade to the playground. As many of you know the overall plan originally included new playground equipment, a learning garden and a walking path. With small adjustments we believe we can get all of these things.

This summer (exact dates TBD) we will install the new playground equipment (with new wood chips and handicap accessible ramps), new benches and a new outdoor learning space. We just received the official school district approval for this plan which means we should face no other hurdles with the installation this summer of these first two projects.

For the walking path, we will be doing a small amount of additional fundraising (probably through grant writing) and will apply for matching grants from the school district in the 2011-2012 school year. We plan to have enough to install a new walking path on the upper field in the summer of 2012.

If you’re interested in learning more sign up for our PTO and Cedar Way Playground Facebook sites, as well as join us at a PTO meeting. Closer to May we will have a better sense of installation dates and will be reaching out to the community for help with the installation.