Crossfield's W.G. Murdoch school's newest playground is now under construction 

Tracey Oldale,  the Chairperson for “Friends of W.G. Murdock” and the school's principal, Derek Keenan, are very excited to see this playground take shape. 

Keenan mentioned that Murdock is a grade 6-12 school and one thing they recognized at the beginning of the process of trying to build a new playground was a play structure that was designed for older students or children in the community. 

“The two main playgrounds that are available, are both geared toward younger children. And we wanted to make sure that our middle school students were being well served by having another play structure, in addition to students with exceptional needs in our community that didn't really have something that was accessible. All of those factored into our design.” 

Construction started Thursday morning and will run Friday and Saturday to hopefully have it completed by the end of the weekend. Keenan did state that it would still take about another week for everything to be complete and to have kids play on it as they will still need to add the base. 

Oldale who handled the financial part of the project, says it was a long process. 

“Fundraising during COVID was not an easy feat. We lost some grants that were awarded to us, which put us behind a couple of times. But things aligned last year, and we were able to get to our total.” 

According to Keenan, the reason those grants were lost was because they weren't used in a certain time frame. 

With the school being right beside the hockey rink and the community hall, they wanted to make sure anybody and everybody could use it. 

“When we designed it, we took visual accessibility into consideration physical accessibility. The design company BDI helped us target the needs of kids with multiple ranges of abilities. So, it meets all ability points,” stated Oldale. 

They are currently looking for volunteers to help them with construction. If you are interested in helping, feel free to sign up. 

Send your news tips, story ideas, pictures, and videos to news@discoverairdrie.com