Volunteers from Pilchuck Contractors, Inc. and Puget Sound Energy help demolish and remove the old playground at Westgate Elementary.

Last weekend, Charlie and Jackson Fritz said goodbye to their playground at Westgate Elementary.

A portion of the old playground was demolished and removed on July 10 to make room for a new playground to be installed this summer.  The remaining equipment is scheduled to be removed next Saturday.

While watching the demolition on Saturday with her sons, parent Karen Wolfe-Fritz felt relief.  She said she’s relieved the rallying for fundraising and grants for a new playground is finally over. 

“I am thrilled to be over with it,” she said.  “Fundraising was like a second full-time job for some of us parents.”

For the last four years, parents had been trying to raise $65,000 to replace the school’s 30 to 50-year-old equipment and move it away from the busy 220th Street.

The steel rings, monkey bars and jungle gym were all original and rusting.  They were just “OK” and not that fun to play on.  And all that metal hurt kids’ hands.

“Even though I live two blocks away from Westgate, [would] I take my kids to play there?” Wolfe-Fritz said.  “No.  [I was] going to get into my car and take them to a playground that has more stuff.”

Charlie, a fourth grader, said the playground was “rusty” and “dangerous.”  First grader Jackson said he usually avoided playing on the monkey bars.

“I didn’t really like it because when I would play on the monkey bars, [they] kept on hurting my hands,” he said.

Some of the equipment didn’t meet Washington state safety codes or general requirements of the American with Disabilities Act, Wolfe-Fritz said.

“A lot of the equipment was there from the time the school was built in the late 1950s, and the earliest renovation was from the 1980s,” she said.  “So it needed to be renovated.”

Pilchuck Contractors, Inc. in partnership with Puget Sound Energy donated their services to demolish and remove the old playground, saving Westgate about $14,000, Wolf-Fritz said.

The total budget for the project was $180,000, but with support from the city of Edmonds and the Edmonds School District, Westgate only needed to raise $65,000 by May.

Thanks to the district’s Capital Partnership Program, all funds raised by the school were matched, cutting their bill to $90,000.  The school received an additional $25,000 by partnering with Edmonds Parks and Recreation to turn the new playground into a community park during non-school hours.

In three years, the school had raised just $30,000 for a new playground, leaving the Westgate community to raise $35,000 in a year for the matched funds – in addition to the $35,000 they already raise yearly for library books, buses for field trips and art supplies.

To raise the last $35,000, they held fundraiser after fundraiser, applied for grants and asked for donations.  They got their lucky break in April when Westgate submitted a one-minute video to a national online contest.

The video, filmed by parent Oliver Massey, features the old, rusty rings and bars of the playground and is set to the Beatles’ tune “Help!”  KaBOOM!, a national non-profit that helps communities build playgrounds, selected it as one of the Top 10 videos. 

After weeks of voting, Westgate moved from first to fourth place in the contest. 

The school didn’t win the contest’s $5,000 for equipment, but thanks to coverage on TV and in newspapers, grants and donations increased, including the offer to demolish and remove the old playground by Pilchuck Contractors and PSE.

When voting for the video didn’t help, David Naro with Pilchuck Contractors asked PSE to help the company “bridge the funding gap” for a new playground at Westgate, said parent David Matulich of PSE.

First grader Jackson Fritz, third grader Peterson Mun and fourth grader Charlie Fritz play on the monkey bars at Westgate one last time before it is demolished.


“It’ll be nice to see new equipment that is more kid-friendly and safer for them,” he said.  “It’s all about the kids; that’s the neat thing about it.”

Many in the Westgate community are excited for the end of the summer when students can finally play on their new playground, Wolfe-Fritz said.

“I’m really happy for the kids and for the community that they’ll get a new playground,” she said.  “I think that once this playground gets installed, that there will be people getting into their cars to get to this playground.”

Jackson said he is excited too.

“I’m just going to see what it looks like, and if it’s fun, I’m going to play on it,” he said.

Westgate plans to hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new playground when students return to school in September.