ELIZABETHTOWN, Ky. — For kids with disabilities, it can be hard to find a place to play and fit in. However, that’s about to change in Elizabethtown. City leaders will soon open what they hope becomes a destination playground for all kinds of Kentucky kids.
Two-year-old Blakely Campbell’s mom is looking forward to it. Blakely has already overcome a lot in her short life.
“She suffered two brain bleeds on both sides of her brain which caused a lot of diagnoses—cerebral palsy and epilepsy, and she is fed exclusively by a G-tube,” Emily Campbell said.
When Emily isn’t holding her, Blakely gets around in a wheelchair, limiting where and how she can play.
“We don’t have really any inclusive parks available,” Campbell said. “And the parks we do have available, there’s maybe like one handicap swing or one area for a kid with disabilities to hang out in and it’s not always available, so it makes things really hard.”
When Campbell heard that Funtopia—Elizabethtown’s popular wooden fortress she herself grew up playing on—was being completely redone to accommodate kids with disabilities, she said she was “beyond ecstatic.”
“Something like that means the world to people like Blakey,” she said.
City of Elizabethtown spokeswoman Amy Inman said the original playground was no longer up to code and needed a makeover.
“We promised that what we would replace it with would be magnificent, and I think we held up our end of the bargain as far as that’s concerned,” Inman said during a tour of the renovated playground.
It’s the same layout as the original Funtopia built around 20 years ago. Even the wooden planks with names of hundreds of families and classrooms that helped build the park will still be on display. However, Inman says the new and improved Funtopia is 95% ADA accessible, making it one of the largest all-inclusive playgrounds in the entire state.
The renovated Funtopia also will incorporate visual elements with braille and sign language into the park and boast tools to help children with sensory processing disorders.
“If your child comes here and they get overstimulated, if they go to the top of the slide and ‘oh it’s too high’ or you just need a second area, there’s sensory centers across the playground so the kids can take a second and go through that and regroup and calm down,” Inman said.
Campbell says it won’t only benefit kids like her daughter.
“Kiddos without disabilities can go to be exposed to kids with disabilities,” she said.
The city of Elizabethtown hopes to re-open the playground in mid-April.
Inman said the city also designed the park with military families in mind, explaining that a lot of disabled veterans from Fort Knox retire in the area. There’s room for disabled parents to play with their kids and even take them up to the slides, too.