With a month remaining in the school year, Montgomery City Elementary School will have a new playground.

Construction on the new $29,180 Little Tikes playground began on the morning of April 12. Numerous area businesses made donations on the playground, including Jonesburg State Bank, Peoples Savings Bank, CertainTeed, Metal Flakes, the MCE Student Council and PTO groups, New Florence Wood Products, Kingdom Telephone, Montgomery County Rotary and the Montgomery City Kiwanis Club.

“I’m very glad that the kids get to play on it this year because our fifth graders will be leaving the building, so this will give them the opportunity to play on it before they move to the middle school since they worked hard to help raise the money,” MCE Principal Jeania Burton said. “Of course, it will be open during the summer, so if families want to come and play on the playground during the summer, it will be here for them. The kids who are going to summer school will play on it. It will be for all of our new Wildcats for years to come.”

MCE bought the new playground from PlayPower LT in Farmington.

“It’s been a year since we started,” Burton said. “Last year, we started earning money around February or March. Then, we ordered the playground. We had all of the funds ready at the end of May.”

Burton said the school had to wait for months for the equipment to arrive.

“It tried our patience because I would email and they would say, ‘It will be another month,’ and I would get excited,” Burton said. “Then, I would email again and I would ask, ‘When is it coming?’ They would say, ‘It’s going to be another month.’ So it kept getting pushed back.”

On April 12, a total of 11 people helped with the installation of the new playground. They were R-II Maintenance Director Ned Stille, board member John Woods, Craig Sanders, Larry Lewis, JR Leu, Shane Hoffmann, Josh Johnson, Jace Beattie, Kale Miller, Troy Reagan and Geoffrey Beaulieu.

“The dads who volunteered were from the PTO,” Burton said. “They provided lunch and drinks for the guys and for all of the organizations and businesses who donated. Without them, this wouldn’t be possible. Collecting those donations was a big piece for making this a possibility.”

Burton said the school decided to get a new playground when the old playground was showing some signs of rust.

“When we see a piece cracking or something is going wrong, our maintenance guys would come out and remove it, so it was slowly dwindling,” Burton said. “We had one slide completely removed. They tried to repair one slide a little bit. As for the rusted piece, we had to tell the children they couldn’t go up there anymore. It was hard for supervision because they can’t go to the top of the playground to slide down because the pieces are rusted. That’s when we knew we had to start working on getting a new playground.”

Burton said the new playground will be a big addition to MCE.

“This new piece is twice the size of the piece that we are replacing,” Burton said. “So it will give more kids an opportunity to play at the same time. There will be two sets of monkey bars instead of one. I think there will be three slides instead of two. There’s also going to be a rock-climbing wall, which is new, and another fire pole to slide down. There are a lot of fun things they’re going to add to it that we didn’t have before.”