On the final night of the summer, Keota School District staff and faculty invited the community to Back to School Night to get their first look at the new addition to campus. Thursday, Keota Schools hosted a ribbon cutting for their new playground. Parents and students who attended Back to School Night got a chance to see the equipment up close and try out the swings, slides and more. Keota Elementary Principal Seth Milledge talked with KCII News about what it means to the district to have amenities like this and the community support that helped make it a reality.
Milledge said, “Our goal was to make our playground more inviting to kids, safer, things like that. We have such great community support, we thought we could leverage that as well as grants that we have had involved in this process, to try to limit the cost to the district. The number of donations we have had from individuals, businesses and memorial-type funds has been amazing. Then the back-breaking, sweat, blood that go into completing a project like this. The kids are excited to get out there. We welcome our students and community back to enjoy it as much as possible. We’re looking forward to the smiles and glee that we’re going to see out there! Thank you to everybody who has made this possible! We couldn’t be more proud and excited to have this here!”
The previous playground had stood for more than 25 years and was disassembled in June of this year. Groundbreaking on the new project took place June 14th. Assembly of the new equipment took three days. From that point work continued on concrete, surfacing, landscaping and more. Total cost for the project was $350,000. Monies came from the Washington County Riverboat Foundation, Keokuk County Community Endowment Fund, Keota Education Foundation, Keota Eagle Advocates, Memorial funds for Ann Sheetz, Travis Greiner, Xen Stoner and Jerry Flynn. This was phase one and two of a three part project to improve the Keota campus. The third phase will be improvements for fourth through sixth graders.