Hello Sidney Parents and Community Members!
We at Sidney Parent Participation Preschool wanted to reach out and let people know the story of our broken slide.
It all started in March of 2016 when St. Paul’s United Church, who we are very grateful to rent from, decided to take down a couple of trees in the yard. Scotty’s Tree Service kindly offered their services free of charge as a contribution to the community. Unfortunately, there was a mishap and a tree fell onto our double slide, cracking it on one side. 
So, for awhile, our slide was closed down until we figured out how to fix it. Sadly, since the tree service was doing the job at no charge, there was no insurance to cover the mishap. After a few months, we were able to find a plastic welder (likely the only one living on Vancouver Island) to repair the damaged slide. The repair cost was covered by the tree service who felt responsible for the damage. Thank you, Scotty’s Tree Service!! The children were happy to enjoy the repaired slide and went on using it for quite some time until…
In September of 2017, we returned to preschool to discover the slide was again cracked. At this point, we felt we needed a more permanent solution. We consulted with playground companies who were able to find replacement slides despite the fact that the company that originally made the climbing structure went out of business long ago. We thought perhaps we had a solution, but then discovered that we’d have to sign a wavier before purchasing the replacement slide for $2,000. And after consulting with our insurance company, we discovered that by signing the wavier, our insurance would be void and as a result, purchasing such a slide would not be an option.
We also learned that any modification a company might do to our climbing structure would require us to sign a wavier, making it impossible for us to even place a panel across and remove the damaged slide.
What would the cost be of replacing the structure, we wondered? Somewhere around $40,000. As a small non-profit preschool, this was not in our budget. To add to that, even the process of having volunteers remove the structure seemed a daunting task.
Finally, we reached out to Home Depot, who have helped us to find a replacement slide that can be purchased without the signing of a wavier. Hooray! Cost? $2,000. We successfully fundraised what we needed to cover the cost.
The slide has now been purchased and Brendon Campbell, Cameron Rundell, and the amazing team from Home Depot is coming to help us with replacing our slide and other playground improvements on Wednesday, July 11th.
We are reaching out to all Sidney Preschool parents past and present…are you able to come out and show your support by helping us repair our playground? We would love for you to join the work party!
In addition to replacing our slide, we plan to re-do the sandbox edging, which has rotted over the years. We hope to add a new garden bed for planting, top up our sandbox, and do a few other small maintenance jobs on our outdoor classroom/playground. Come out and lend a hand! Everyone is welcome 🙂
We hope that our new playground will serve the families living in Sidney and the surrounding for years to come.
If you would like to volunteer, please contact sidneypreschoolteacher@gmail.com
*Please note: Home Depot had to postpone our date so we are waiting to hear but we will have a new date soon to do our playground updates! Check back here for more info.
