Audin Rhodes/MDN Students explore Sunnyside Elementary’s new pirate ship themed, accessible piece of playground equipment that was handbuilt by Minot High School students with disabilities as part of a grant Sunnyside Elementary received.

This upcoming school year, students at Sunnyside Elementary will be able to play on a new accessible, handbuilt pirate ship constructed by Minot High School students.

“The intention of this was to construct a playground element for students with disabilities. It undoubtedly will be used by all students, though,” said Matt Ruhland, high school instructor at both Magic City Campus and Central Campus, and soon to be full-time instructor at Magic City Campus.

The students enrolled in Ruhland’s “Introduction to Technical Education” course are the students who helped design and build the playground structure for Sunnyside Elementary.

The fall semester class of 2023 at Magic City Campus was composed of 14 juniors and seniors who were responsible for designing and cutting most of the wood for the project.

The spring semester class of 2024 at Central Campus was composed of seven students who were tasked with assembling and attaching the large halves of the ship together.

Both semester classes consisted entirely of students with disabilities, which, for Ruhland made this collaboration with Sunnyside Elementary all the more impactful.

“They’re essentially doing a service project and giving back to an elementary school. Even if they didn’t go to Sunnyside, they’re giving back by (building) something that they sure would’ve loved to use when they were kids,” Ruhland said.

One of Ruhland’s favorite things about working on the project was the imagination his students brought to the drafting table.

“Principal Cook initially sent a couple pictures and ideas,” Ruhland said. “Then I basically did a brainstorming session with my students and classroom paraprofessionals at school. It was fun.”

“Do you think they would like this? Would this be cool?” Ruhland asked his students during the brainstorming session, encouraging them to put themselves in the shoes of the elementary students.

“So we went through that, sketched some stuff up and sent it to Principal Cook and we got the go ahead and had fun with it,” Ruhland said.

“Designing stuff with (the students). … Then building (the ship) and having them see it and get excited as it was starting to get assembled and they could see ‘yeah this is actually going to be a ship,’ was definitely the funnest part,” he said.

Ruhland is excited to see how the Sunnyside teachers plan to utilize the ship in their classroom lessons.

“They’re going to have fun with it regardless of the programming,” he said.

Cindy Cook, principal at Sunnyside for the last 22 years, said Sunnyside’s special education teacher, Elizabeth Slotsve, is planning on utilizing the ship in her class curriculum.

“That’s what we need the sensory wall for,” Cook said about installing a sensory wall onto the ship.

A sensory wall is a panel or “wall” of varying textures, shapes and activities designed to engage the senses. These structures are beneficial to all students and especially to students who have autism spectrum disorders, intellectual disabilities and/or other sensory processing disorders.

“The cool one we saw was about eight feet long. It had some waves and you could do the little beads on the waves. It had ABCs. It had some spinners that they could do, like the tic-tac-toe spinners. Gears that you could rotate. So just a variety,” Cook said about the sensory wall candidate she and Slotsve had looked at together.

“And so (Slotsve) had found a couple of different (sensory walls) but we wanted to see how much we had left in the budget before we got them,” Cook said.

Cook estimated about $3,600 was spent on constructing the ship out of the allotted $5,000 from the grant, leaving room for a sensory wall purchase.

The Adaptive Recreation Grant had been awarded to Sunnyside Elementary in 2023 by the North Dakota Association for the Disabled (NDAD). The grant is offered annually by NDAD but is not specifically for schools alone.

According to NDAD, the Adaptive Recreation Grant is an opportunity for organizations to support adaptive recreational activities for people with disabilities. The grants are available to organizations in North Dakota and adjacent border communities.

For Sunnyside Elementary, the need for an accessible playground for students with disabilities was pressing.

“We have a really small playground. It’s all gravel and most of our equipment isn’t accessible for kids using wheelchairs and even our kids with leg braces or kids who use walkers or canes. It’s not accessible at all,” Cook said.

Cook gestured to the small, paved corner hugging the school’s edge where students with disabilities were previously relegated to play due to the gravel in other parts of the playground limiting students with mobility disabilities.

“If you go up to Hoeven, they’re fabulous. They worked really hard to make sure their playground was inclusive. They spent lots of time and money raising,” Cook said. “They have a fabulous playground. Edison has the preschool and also has an (adaptive) playground. But if you look at most of the (Minot) playgrounds, we don’t.”

Cook shared the school had looked for other materials to replace the gravel but no materials were within the school’s budget. Poured-in-place rubber is extremely expensive and would have cost Sunnyside around $140,000 just to do a small square in the playground courtyard.

A creative solution to the accessible playground surface problem was found thanks to Monika Fischer-Hancock, a paraprofessional at Sunnyside Elementary.

“It was all because of one paraprofessional who pushed it and said, ‘My little kids need something to play on. Look at this cool ship I found,’ and then we went digging to find money and (NDAD) gave us the grant,” Cook said. Fisher-Hancock was the one who originally found the NDAD grant and encouraged the school to apply.

Fischer-Hancock and Cook looked at designs for pirate ship playground equipment and shortly thereafter the collaboration with Matt Ruhland and his class was initiated via an email from Cook.

Cook was inspired to ask Ruhland and his class about designing and building the ship because of the playhouse Ruhland’s class built a few years prior for the childcare program at the Minot Area Workforce Academy, next to the new high school building.

“His class did an amazing job,” Cook said the construction of the ship. “Matt (Ruhland) and his class did everything from scratch. He had nothing but a picture and some approximate measurements. I’m impressed with the high school kids and I’m really impressed with Matt. … I’m just so thankful that the high school students would do this for us.”

Cook said not only will the ship be a great piece of equipment for students with disabilities, it will also be fun for students without disabilities.

“Playground is one of the times where everyone can play together,” Cook said. “This is a perfect space to encourage kids to play together, which is what we want.”

The first day of school for all Minot Public Schools is Aug. 21.