Swing sets on elementary school playgrounds in Cabell County will soon become a thing of the past.
Cabell County Schools officials have decided to remove the traditional playground toys because of increasing safety standards and exposure to insurance claims and lawsuits stemming from swing set injuries.
This is getting more and more pathetic as time goes by. The entire country is now at the mercy of lawyers and the lack or tort reform. Soon walking on a sidewalk will be banned. But next on the list: slides.
Found by JD Adkins.
ummm I’ve never seen an elementary school with a swingset. It’s not the same as public playground where every set of kids should have a parent watching them.
How do kids get to ride in cars?
I was in Elementary school on the late ’60s, early ’70s never had swings at school because they were a safety hazard, and at home we were required to anchor them to the ground. So this story is a non-story to me. Now if the swings at the local park or at home were being banned then you would really have a story. Sorry John.
When do kinds have time for swing sets when they have all those video games to play and texts to send?
Just ask Nintendo to make Swing for the Wii and then you should be fine.
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It’s West Virginia. How else those poor dumb crackers gonna make money besides selling meth and suing the schools that are babysitting their illegitimate offspring.
A friend snapped an ankle after a high flying dismount from the swings. He cried and screamed, came back in a cast and became a minor celebrity during recess. We learned from his mistake and never attempted the same stunt. It’s called being a kid.
The school playgrounds here are just a grass field with a chain link fence around it. No playground equipment on it at all. And I don’t really understand how they can get away with the fence. Some child might run into it or brush up against it and be injured. They should put a pad on the interior surface of that fence to prevent scratches and other potentially lethal, disfiguring, life-ending, traumatic stress syndrome, unable to ever hold a job or do anything at all the rest of their lives injuries!!! Or just take the fence down and tell them to stay inside the “play area”, not touch each other, do not run, just sit and enjoy the fresh air. Yeah that’ll work. Good lord.
#5
We’uns in west virjinya don’t take too kindly to yor remarx bout are educashon and chilluns and whatever meth is unless you is talk bout that crazy stuff harley makes in the old traler out back.
we have a swing even at home, and at hog time it is really handy thing to use when slaughterin.
the kidz will be fine once we coat everything in the world with Nerf.
It’s a wonder there’s anybody over the age of 30 alive…..what would we do without the govt, and lawyers to protect us?
We didn’t wear helmets and pads when riding bikes, never wore seatbelts till I was almost 20 yrs old. played on the most decrepit and broken down playgrounds ever and we all survived….imagine that.
there was a freak accident last week where a local child fell from some sort of teeter totter and died. Tragic for sure, but definitely a freak accident, one-in-a-million, but immediately any other playground that had the same equipment started pulling it or building fences around it to stop kids from playing on it.
Really? is this what society has become?
When I was a kiddie, our next door neighbor had 1.5 acres and a tractor. He dug a hole and let the rain/natural spring fill it up. Soon their were frogs, bamboo, fish, dragonflies and all sorts of things right next door. FUN!!!!!
Then one day the guy plowed it all in and started growing tomatoes. Said there were too many kids in the neighborhood and he didn’t want to get sued. Who could blame him?
“Attractive Nuisance.” We need to let kiddies kill themselves off to benefit the population. Course, with a social safety net of any worth, the desire to sue would be greatly reduced.
I wouldn’t want to be a kiddie today.
They banned swings, tag, playing with balls at recess, sledding, running on the playground, and pointing index fingers at each other and yelling “Bang! Bang!”
How are the kids going to work off all that energy? Won’t they be wild? Ah, we have drugs for that now? They have side effects, sure, but they keep the kids quiet as unthinking zombies.
What about exercise? Aren’t we worried about obesity? Ah, we’ll just ban cupcakes, and birthday cake. School lunches will be a bland concoction of gruel free of anything that might resemble gluten, peanuts, meat, dessert, or anything tasty. If kids are fat, the school will just blame the students and the parents. Those parents obviously feed their kids Ho Hos and soda pop and then sit them in front of an Xbox. It’s not the fact that the kids have a lot of homework to do because the teachers are too busy dispensing drugs, dealing with discipline problems from recess starved kids, and showing kids how to put condoms on cucumbers; so just send the math, reading, and science to do at home.
Only if they are lucky will they learn anything. Most teachers don’t teach anymore because they are too busy reviewing kids to get ready for some standardized test.
So just let the kids swing at recess.
First they came for the teeter-totters
and I didn’t speak up.
As a kid I jumped off the swings, fell off the monkey-bars and slid from the merry-go-round on to a a hard dirt playground. I don’t recall anybody ever getting more than a skinned knee or elbow and we all had a GREAT time. The PC crap is really starting to get old. Time for real people to take back their lives. Yo, helicopter parents-get over it. Check with your grandparents about all this an heed their knowledge, Your PARENTS haven’t got a clue.
As I recall, the swings at my elementary school were over blacktop. If you fell, you didn’t fall on the grass.
I am so sick and tired of the government trying to protect me from myself that I want to move to another planet!! The lawyers and litigators are making life difficult for us so that they may enrich themselves.
I totally agree with this decision. In the early 80’s when I was in grade school, I was playing on the swing set and I fell off and hit the back of my head. Ever since then, I have suffered brain problems. Such as writing post like these, extolling the virtues of enriching lawyers and attempts at stupid decisions of promoting ridiculous levels of safety that actually don’t make children safer.
This is a link to a Consumer Product Safety Commission report from 2001. http://www.cpsc.gov/library/foia/foia01/os/equipmnt.pdf
This should be a concern considering the economic stress schools and public parks are under. One of the first sectors of a city budget to get cut is the parks and recreation department. A playground near me was closed due to rats in the sawdust; in other words, it was condemned.
In 1999, there were over 200,000 emergency room admissions for playground equipment-related injuries – many being fractures. It seems to me the big reason for injuries is due to falling. The rubberized landing surface mentioned in the article will probably pay for itself over time since it doesn’t have to be maintained like a sawdust or grass area. The same reasoning is why many high schools are going to artificial surface for their football stadiums.
When I was in elementary school, in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, we didn’t have swing sets at school. Even back then, long before Proposition 13, the district was constantly complaining about not having enough $. (We didn’t have enough books and had to share!)
But we did have monkey bars on which you could get a pretty good swing going and land on the blacktop.
Oh, and we DID wear seatbelts in our family, where they were available. But I did ride from LA to Vancouver BC in the way-back of a station wagon.
While I think it’s plain old silly to ban swings, merry-go-rounds, dodgeball, etc. I should point out to those who claim: “We did all this horrible stuff and we all survived” that those who did not survive are not here to tell about it!
My HOA won’t put in swings in the common area because of liability concerns.
Yeah, I know HOA’s are evil constructs, too.
I wonder how many lives have been saved since they banned tetherball.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetherball
Think of the children.
I feel lucky having grown up riding around on freight train car ladders, in the beds of pickup trucks, on fat-tired one-speed bikes, and once standing right behind the pilot in an Eastern Airlines commercial DC-3 flight, climbing trees and cliffs, cutting through yards and crop fields, walking down creek beds, swimming in rivers and lakes, exploring construction sites at daybreak.
It was an adult world. We kids just worked out how to live in it. That’s why we wanted to grow up. Now it’s the opposite.
All tort reform does is prevent the citizen from suing a business.
It does NOT prevent a large business from suing YOU.
I’m sure that far more school kids, in the US, are getting severely injured playing football. Some even suffering brain trauma. And yet, nobody’s saying it’s too dangerous a sport, for anyone younger than college age. If there were a huge money making franchise behind swing set use, this wouldn’t be an issue. But since there isn’t a multi-billion dollar sporting industry to lobby for its play in all high schools and most colleges. Then swing sets have no such powerful packing to keep them around.
Frankly, they are pretty dangerous things. Kids under a certain age ought not to be allowed anywhere near them. But good luck pounding that bit of logic into the average parent. They still look at swing sets thru a nostalgic haze. Just as they once did Lawn Darts, and firecrackers. Yeah, we should never give up passing on any age old activities on our kids, just because we’ve learned how potentially dangerous these things are.
A little girl from my neighborhood was killed by a swing set. It was one of this giant iron playground things and the welds holding the top bar had become increasingly weakened until one broke and the bar came down and caved int the side of her skull, killing her. I think she was about 6.
I don’t have a problem in us constantly assessing things that “we’ve always done” to make sure that they are, in fact, safe. When things like swing sets begin disappearing from playgrounds, it is usually the perfect example of the benefits of our capitalist system. They start to disappear because there is a clear increase in catastrophic accidents leading to a clear increase in insurance premiums which leads to a clear increase in their removal from playgrounds. It’s “the invisible hand” protecting us…
What are you talking about? Elementary schools don’t have swing sets? Not true. Ours does and it always has. With that said, bring on tort reform!