By Nathalie Medina, age 10
The entire city budget of New York City is roughly $115 billion. But the parks budget is only $580 million, reports City & State.
“The entire forestry department, which cares for all the city’s parks as well as street trees, has been underfunded for decades,” Adam Ganser, the executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, told City & State.
Now parks need more money so that they can be cleaner and safer. In New York, people go to parks so that they can have fun with family or friends, get away from smoke and loud noise, and breathe fresh air in an area that is quiet and peaceful.
People stop going to parks because they are dirty and dangerous, and some neighborhoods have less green space, such as in Queens Community District 2 and Brooklyn Community District 17, according to City & State. The parks with less resources also have fewer volunteers. “Look at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, which has a tiny conservancy of about four people. It gets nowhere near the care that Central Park does,” said Ganser.
When parks become unsafe, children get hurt more easily. According to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, each year more than 220,000 children under the age of 14 are treated in hospital emergency rooms because they get hurt in parks or playgrounds. Some things like bumps and bruises are most common, but you can also break a bone, dislocate something, get a concussion, and sprain an ankle.
My friend fractured her ankle and broke her toe going down a slide that had square holes at a park. Because of the holes, her foot got stuck on one of the squares. She has been wearing casts and boots for over four months and has to wear them for two more months at the time of this writing. Since my friend got hurt, I have been more cautious about what equipment I use.
More injuries like this occur when equipment at parks have sharp edges in areas where people turn, hard materials like poles and swings in the air, and old worn-out items with holes or rust. Hot surfaces, like a metal slide or the place that you hold on to in the swing, can burn you in less than three seconds in the summer. If you fall down on hard surfaces like a concrete floor, you might get cut, scratched, or scraped.
Parks that are not taken care of well enough, or at all, might have very few people that go to them because of dirty bathrooms, rats, rust, holes, uncut grass, low-quality equipment, and the park being small. People would rather not go to parks that have broken and rusty equipment and are really dirty.
Parks can become cleaner and safer, but they need help from the government and the communities. With that help, they can be the way that people would want them to be. At a minimum, parks departments should replace rusty and broken items. Parks should be well maintained—grass should be cut, soft surfaces should be added, and sharp edges removed. Items with holes should be removed, and bathrooms should be clean. Parks should be fixed so that people enjoy them without having to worry.
