What Parents At Orchard Gardens School Are Protesting

BOSTON, MA — Family members of students at the Orchard Gardens school want what any parents want for their children at school, and what they don't want is to have to worry about their kids getting pricked by needles on the playground.

In an effort to show their displeasure with the state of the playground, parents blocked traffic at Melnea Cass Boulevard and Albany Street after school let out Tuesday afternoon. They carried signs that demanded the city clean up the Orchard Gardens school playground area.

Some stuck in the traffic thus created were more amenible than others, as Adam Gaffin at the Universal Hub reports.

Parents took to Facebook later professing to continue the protest until the school got an 8 foot fence around the property, a pressure wash of the play structure to remove bodily fluids, wood chip and mulch replacement to remove all the hidden needles from the playground, cutting and trimming of bushes and daily monitoring and sweeps of the playground complete with a log.

The demands are listed in a Change.org online petition that more than 1,400 people have signed.

"As you can see we are not asking for millions of dollars we are asking for simple things like a fence & new mulch. This is NOT too much to ask for & hope this gets done immediately so that the students of this school can feel safe & go back to playing outside," wrote Ed Shoemaker, who has a child, though not at the school, on Facebook.

Orchard Gardens is a public pilot school for kindergarten through grade 8, serving more than 800 students. It was selected by Obama's President’s Commission on the Arts & Humanities for using the arts to dramatically improve instruction. But it's also not far from "Methadone Mile," a one-mile stretch of Mass Avenue near Boston Medical Center where there are three methadone clinics, homeless shelters and drug treatment programs in the area.

Student have even had to learn what to do if they see needles.

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Jenna Fisher can be reached at Jenna.Fisher@patch.com or by calling 617-942-0474. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram (@ReporterJenna).

Photo Courtesy Ed Shoemaker