These Central Seattle school kids are getting a soft addition to their blacktop playground

Part of life for many Pacific Northwest kids — especially in densely populated areas around Capitol Hill — are affordable and long-lasting hard-top paved elementary school playgrounds. Seattle Public Schools has budgeted to change that for one corner of a neighborhood school’s campus.

Plans are afoot for a $416,000 project to install synthetic turf on a large rectangle of the Leschi Elementary School campus, according to city permits. The new turf area will be installed where the school’s futsal court is currently marked.

Area parents will take note especially at Capitol Hill’s Stevens Elementary where the kids make a sprawling expanse of blacktop their recess and play area along with a wood chip-filled climbing structure and slide.

Also on 19th Ave E, the private Jesuit St. Joseph School has hopes of softening its asphalt play surface. The school’s strategic plan includes an initiative to create a combined playfield above a parking structure. The nearby Holy Names all-girls Catholic high school completed a similar project to construct a new gymnasium and underground parking structure — but only after some drawn-out debate with nearby homeowners.

For the city’s public schools, campus improvements continue even as the system has recently considered closures of some campuses including Stevens due to declining enrollment. The city school system’s capital budget for construction projects is separate from its spending on staff and operations.

Leschi has been an area of investment for SPS where it constructed four new classrooms to help relieve crowding in 2021 as well as a recent playground overhaul and seismic upgrades of the original 1909-era building.



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